When arguing to the Fourth Circuit about the retained claims to harm for "office productivity software", Microsoft was successful in eliminating Novell's GroupWise software from inclusion for lack of sufficient notice.

However this victory was of a tactical nature. It does not oblige us to ignore the importance Microsoft attached to Novell's ability to compete in cross-platform and networked multi-user functionality.

The term "middleware" nowhere appears in the Fourth Circuit's order to reverse and remand (for trial on Count I minus GroupWise), and it was Microsoft's trial strategy to give it a narrow interpretation. However the application API's involved in this case do invoke networked (storage and permissions) functionality, as may be seen from this snippet of the testimony of Novell's Adam Harral about Namespace Extensions quoted by PJ's article:

So now the question was, how do I get the recycle bin to show up? It's not just a directory. It's actually a place across multiple places. Am I going to have to rewrite the recycle bin and duplicate exactly what it does? Network neighborhood was a bringing together of all the networks. And now if I have -- I have code and shared code that can talk to a network, but how do I present those networks? How do I know what ones even the user has access to because all of that is already defined in the shell in that NameSpace. So I've got to go talk to that NameSpace to be able to represent the same view that they have out of the shell in my product.

In ruling favorably on Microsoft's JMOL, Judge Motz identifies two theories advanced by Novell about its potential to "cross-platform" its applications after entering the Windows 95 market, the "franchise theory" and the "middleware theory".

His reasoning about the "franchise theory" is tortured, but let's not critique that at the moment. Instead turn to what he says about the second:

Novell's second argument is its middleware theory. For a middleware product to have an impact on competition in the PC operating systems market, the product (1) must be cross-platformed to various operating systems; (2) must be ubiquitous on the "dominant operating system"; and (3) must expose a sufficient number of APIs of its own to entice ISVs to write applications to it rather than to the operating system on which it sits. (See Noll, Trial Tr. at 1923-26, Nov. 15, 2011; Finding of Fact §28). Novell's office productivity applications did not meet any of these requirements.

Microsoft's position is based upon the Findings of Fact made in the government case, upon which Novell's claim is founded. Judge Jackson found that "[c]urrently, no middleware product exposes enough APIs to allow independent software vendors ("ISVs") profitably to write full-featured personal productivity applications that rely solely on . . . APIs [of the middleware product itself]." Finding of Fact §28. In contrast, Novell argues the exposure of APIs that would result in "something less" than the writing of full-featured personal product applications is sufficient to constitute a threat to Microsoft's monopoly. (Novell Opp'n at 89-90). This argument is based on the concept, expressed by Noll, that diminishing, as opposed to nearly eliminating, the barrier to entry that protected Microsoft's monopoly in the PC operating systems market was itself sufficient. (Noll, Trial Tr. at 1926, Nov. 15, 2011). To the extent this testimony is based on the premise that other companies would produce similar middleware that, in combination with Novell's products, would diminish the barrier to entry, there is no evidence such other products existed.

The point I tried to make is that Novell had significantly more networking and cross-platforming capability than Judge Motz credits them with, and Microsoft's terror at the prospect is evident in the material Judge Motz cites in footnotes 9 and 10.

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"Prolog is an efficient programming language because it is a very stupid theorem prover." -- Richard O'Keefe

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