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(c) assigned to PJ

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Part of this effort is about Comes v Microsoft (another case). Groklaw is just putting the entire evidence in a data base for the "record".

See:
Exhibits and Transcripts from Comes v. Microsoft

Key in the data base, as an example, is:

Where the email evidence shows Bill Gates commanded critical OS "hooks" (APIs????) be kept secret from competition.

Microsoft's Allegedly Undocumented APIs - Comes v. Microsoft

and

Comes Exhibit 2151 - Gates: "I have decided we should not publish these extensions." - Updated

Here's another relevant exhibit, Exhibit 2151 [PDF] from the collection of exhibits in the Comes v. Microsoft case, an email from Bill Gates, the subject was "Shell plans - iShellBrowser", dated October 3, 1994, to Bill Bass, Bob Muglia et al. In connection with iShellBrowswer, Gates writes:

I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage. This means that Capone and Marvel can still live in the top level of the Explorer namespace, but will run separately. We can continue to use the iShellBrowser APIs for MS provided views such as control panel, and can use them for other MS-provided views that don't create a large compatibility or ISV issue....

Having the Office team really think through the information intensive scenarios, and be a demanding client of systems is absolutely critical to our future success. We can't compete with Lotus and Wordperfect/Novell without this. Our goal is to have Office '96 sell better because of the shell integration work, and to have the Ren/Office effort yield technology that can be an integral part of the shell in Windows '97.

There you are. X marks the spot.

The email is in an odd, hard-to-read font, so if anyone knows the names are wrong, please let me know. We aim to get it right. I have not corrected any typos. We are working to complete our Comes exhibit collection so you can help us make it more easily searchable, and we also have all the exhibits that were posted in the Minnesota antitrust case against Microsoft, Gordon v. Microsoft and we'll be including them. This exhibit is from that collection, actually. You can view it here, from our Gordon v. Microsoft permanent page we are working on again, and if you click on the graphic, it will get bigger. Click again and it gets small. So if I'm quieter than usual for a bit, that will be why.

I wanted to mention that it was an anonymous commenter who found this. Sometimes people tell me not to allow anonymous comments, but this is why I never agree.

See the Comes vs Microsoft database for more...

What do you think? Does this "Comes" evidence, the email from Gates in the database, show where at the top of Microsoft, that a decision was made, to hide needed parts of their OS from their competition. Parts of the OS, related to their Office Suite maybe, that ONLY their own MS OFFICE TEAM KNEW ABOUT? Where these critical "hooks" were hidden and not disclosed, to their "OFFICE" competition?

Imagine now, how if this were in the main stream press at the time of the anti-trust trial, what would have happened?

Do you see now, where the US justice system didn't see the importance of tech evidence, even in that email, missed somehow (at the time of the US v Microsoft anti-trust case)?

Many know now, after COMES and the email, how US justice fell way short of a full understanding of how aggressive that MS was against the competition (wanted to kill off all competition).

And, since, it seems that some of the same folks are at the top of MS today, a question exists, "are the MS tactics the same today, or are they just better at them vs then". Or, can it be that some experience makes some better at hiding it now (no email trail)?

Is this, a question that needs to be asked, given the evidence of the past?

The Comes v Microsoft case, is full of history that Groklaw is attempting to preserve...

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