Forward - The US Library of
Congress is going to
keep a record of Groklaw... - so, Groklaw is going the
extra mile to be a resource preserved for all time...!
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... [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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