In a July 11, 1999 memo to company officials, Gates writes of meeting Nokia CEO Jorma Ollila at a conference and talking about Web-enabled phones and \ufffdthis whole cheap browser area.\ufffd Gates goes on about how he\ufffds trying to impress Ollila and win him over to Microsoft\ufffds vision of what wireless Internet access should look and feel like.

(MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

Gates says he agreed with Ollila\ufffds idea that Portable Digital Assistants (PDA), like the Palm Pilot, need some kind of voice recognition feature to facilitate Web surfing on the hand held devices.

Gates then admits he purposefully mislead \ufffd a less kind observer would say \ufffdlied\ufffd \ufffd to Ollila about Microsoft\ufffds research and development advances, in hopes of persuading Nokia to work with Microsoft and not others. \ufffdWe talked about how voice and screens will come together,\ufffd Gates writes, \ufffdI said there were a lot of key scenarios that we [sic] our PDA group was patenting around (I wish our activity level here was really as high as I suggested to him),\ufffd Gates writes.

After musing about being astonished at \ufffdthe number of Palm Pilots I saw at this conference,\ufffd Gates ends his message suggesting a course of brutal software engineering the likes of which initially landed his company in a court room in the first place.

\ufffdWe really need to demonstrate to people like Nokia why our PDA will connect to Office in a better way that other PDAs,\ufffd Gates writes, \ufffdeven if it means changing how we do flexible schema in Outlook and how we tie some of our audio and video advanced work to only run on our PDAs.\ufffd

Remember that this message was written during the heart of the antitrust trial. His company taking a beating, both in the press and on Wall Street, Gates is apparently oblivious to the possible ramifications of such a suggestion. Even in the white hot spotlight a federal antitrust trial, Gates shows he\ufffds not about to change the company\ufffds competitive behavior. If you can\ufffdt beat \ufffdem, break \ufffdem, is the way Gates and Microsoft typically operate.

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