Time September 16, 2019Smith became intrigued with
personal computers and bought
his first IBM PC in the mid-1980s,
in his third year of law school. After
graduating, he interviewed at Cov-
ington & Burling, a Washington
law firm, on the condition that the
job come with a computer. He got
both. “They said no one had asked
for one before,” Smith recalls. As
the firm’s resident technologist, he
worked on copyright issues for the
nascent software industry’s trade
association, which gained the notice
of lawyers at Microsoft. He joined
the company in 1993 as head of its
Euro pean legal and corporate affairs
team, based in Paris, with a man-
date to fight software piracy.
During his first mEEting in
Seattle with Gates, Smith presented
the CEO with a one-page memo on
a proposed European Community
copyright directive. After marking
up the sheet with a pencil, Gates
grabbed a blue marker and began
brainstorming ideas on a white-
board, using his hand as an eraser.
“It was covered in blue ink by the
end of the meeting,” Smith recalls,
over a lunch of grilled salmon at a
restaurant on campus. “You could
see the wheels turning.”
Gates’ taste for legal combat led
Microsoft into a series of confronta-
tions with competitors and with the
U.S. Department of Justice, culmi-
nating in a four-year antitrust trial
over the company’s attempts to
limit the use of non- Microsoft web
browsers on its dominant Windows
platform. Though it reached a ten-
tative settlement with the federal
government in 2001, Microsoft re-
mained embroiled in numerous
suits with states, foreign govern-
ments and other tech companies.
When Smith returned to the U.S.
in 2002 to become general counsel,
he pleaded with Gates and Steve
Ballmer, who was then running
the company, to “make peace” with
their adversaries. “Until there was
peace brought to the industry, we
wouldn’t see the regulatory pres-
sures subside,” Smith says. “And
making peace also required we
change the way we worked inter-
nally and develop a capability to
work with governments.”
It was a crucial business deci-
sion, Smith says. Had Microsoft
continued its assaults on regulators
and the competition, “we wouldn’t
be the most valuable company in
the world today. We wouldn’t have
been given the opportunity. We
had to persuade people that we
deserved their trust.” In the fore-
word to Tools and Weapons, Gates
credits Smith with driving “a big
cultural and strategic shift” at Mi-
crosoft that saw the company “put
more time and energy into con-
necting with... the government,
our partners and sometimes even
our competitors.”
That has given Smith cred-
ibility with the newer moguls of
tech, even if he’s delivering a mes-
sage they don’t like. Late last year,
Facebook founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg reached out to Smith,^
As Microsoft’s longest-serving executive, Smith
(pictured outside the Supreme Court in February
2018) has steered the company out of legal troublesTechnology
at Gates’ suggestion, for advice on how the social
network should handle scrutiny from lawmakers,
the media and the general public. Smith says he
consults “from time to time” with Zuckerberg and
Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
“Some problems are deeper and broader today
than they would be if we’d started to move toward
some smarter regulation a decade ago,” Smith says.
Among other things, he favors laws to limit how
artificial intelligence and facial-recognition soft-
ware are developed and used by both private com-
panies and government agencies.
At the same time, he pushes back against calls
for government to impose stiffer penalties against
the biggest tech companies, or even break them
up. That is disappointing but not surprising, says
Danny O’Brien, director of strategy at the Elec-
tronic Frontier Foundation, which advocates
for online privacy rights. “When it comes to big
solutions,” O’Brien says, Smith “is not going to