Rusty, the "chinese wall" takes me back to the article noted in my profile, sitting there lo these many years. The "Chinese wall" was amended to "flying in formation" by Ballmer long ago. I suppose there might have been some attempt to resurect the "chinese wall" line at trial, somewhat like the revisionist history on Microsoft inventing the browser and Bill being on top of the internet all along, like I said I don't follow this stuff quite the way I used to. Anyway, some history on the "chinese wall", from around.com
The flow of inside information will remain a critical issue for the antitrust investigators. In the 1980's, Microsoft executives often spoke of a "Chinese wall" between the systems group, responsible for DOS and Windows, and the applications group, responsible for the programs that ran in those operating environments. Ballmer himself once said there was "a very clean separation" -- "It's like the separation of church and state." Competitors were dubious, knowing that all neurons at Microsoft led to Bill Gates; these days Microsoft executives take a different tack. They deny that the concept of a Chinese wall ever existed. They admit that their own developers sometimes get an edge in knowing how to take advantage of new Windows features before the knowledge spreads to competitors, but they insist that the knowledge does spread sooner or later?because it is in their interest to make sure that everyone writes for Windows?and they say that's as level as the playing field needs to be.
The final blow to the applications market came with the emergence of "office suites"?packages of word processors, spreadsheets and data bases bundled together. Again, Microsoft saw the opportunity first and made sure that its package was more tightly integrated than its competitors' could be. It announced a new standard, called OLE (for "object linking and embedding"), that allowed, say, a word processor document to display and even work with a spreadsheet. Again competitors charged, and continue to charge, that Microsoft manipulates the OLE specifications to its advantage-changing them to suit its applications programs. Almost as an afterthought, Microsoft also added its not well regarded Powerpoint presentation-graphics software to the package, effectively cutting the price to zero and transforming that business over night. Though transforming may not be the perfect word. "Microsoft didn't transform the market, but strangled it," says Karl Wong, director and principal analyst at Dataquest, a research company.
"Chinese wall", "flying in formation", it's all the same in Microsoftese. When Ballmer was talking about "church and state", he left out the part about Bill being the Ayatollah in the Microsoft theocracy, I think.
Cheers, Dan. |
