Advice for Mark Zuckerberg: Do not behave the way Bill Gates did in 1998

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Will Zuckerberg take the Bill Gates approach?

Mark Zuckerberg might want to bone up on his browser history.

When Microsoft was under fire from the Justice Department in 1998 for forcing Internet Explorer down the throats of companies around the world, then-Chairman and CEO Bill Gates went into full bobbing-and-weaving mode.

Or, as former Yahoo Finance host Jeff Macke describes it, Gates was a “total d—k,” when he should have been more cooperative. And it ultimately cost him.

Here’s a snippet from Gates’s infamous deposition:

Adam Liptak, senior counsel for the New York Times back then, called it “a disastrous deposition” and “a comic masterpiece of evasion and obfuscation.”

In a Wednesday tweet, Macke, president of Macke Asset Management, doesn’t disagree, saying Zuckerberg should learn from Gates’s mistakes if he wants Facebook to recover:

Facebook: the stock only bottoms if they “surrender”. 

The $MSFT Dead $ Scenario triggers if $FB fights back. MSFT spent so much energy beating the DOJ and Netscape they never saw Apple coming. Zuck needs to kneel. Be convincing. The Win for $FB is to lose fast. 

The charts...pic.twitter.com/UmXf7R5sow

— Jeff Macke (@JeffMacke) March 21, 2018

The takeaway from his scrawling chartstorm is that he believes Zuckerberg needs to step up and “own it.” Get out in front of all this before FacebookFB, +0.74% has a “lost decade” as MicrosoftMSFT, -0.70% did. Or even becomes the next MySpace.

So far, Zuckerberg’s been off the radar.

With the government going after Facebook and political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for obtaining information belonging to 50 million of the social media company’s users without permission, Zuckerberg hasn’t had much to say, though that reportedly will be changing soon.