MICROSOFT PLANNED TO SABOTAGE COMPETITORS
By Wendy Goldman Rohm
Red Herring Online
August 25, 1998
"We should surely crash the system ..."
These are the words which one Microsoft vice president, David Cole, wrote in a memo to other senior executives at Microsoft (MSFT) -- including Senior Vice President Brad Silverberg -- about how to sabotage a competing operating system, DR DOS.
Mr. Cole's memo is just part of the evidence the Justice Department has collected under subpoena in its effort to prove that Microsoft's business practices are monopolistic and predatory. This evidence has never been made public before. Sources include those who distributed the messages, Microsoft insiders, and government sources.
The confidential messages were written by Microsoft employees between September 1991 and February 1992, as Microsoft was shipping the "Christmas beta" of Windows 3.1, which included code that could detect what Mr. Cole's memo called "alien operating systems," like DR DOS, an MS-DOS competitor produced by Digital Research. If Windows 3.1 was not running on MS-DOS, it would show users fake error messages.
On a treadmill
At the time, Microsoft officials defended the warnings as innocuous, and designed to help users. Microsoft removed the warning from the final version of Windows 3.1 -- but only after it had shipped thousands of copies of the beta, creating the impression that DR DOS could not run with Windows without potential errors, something corporate computer managers dreaded.
But Mr. Cole considered going well beyond using the detection feature to give users questionable warnings. In
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