Microsoft: IBM, Sun And Others Colluded Against Us
By Darryl K. Taft
Washington, D.C.
4:44 PM EST Wed., Nov. 18, 1998
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Microsoft Corp.'s legal team on Wednesday accused some of the biggest software companies in the business of colluding against the Redmond, Wash.-based software titan.
Midway through week four of the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft, Microsoft attorney Steven Holley suggested that it was Netscape Communications Corp., Oracle Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., IBM Corp., Novell Inc. and Apple Computer Inc. ganging up on Microsoft, and not the other way around.
During cross-examination of John Soyring, IBM's director of network computing, Holley referred to an E-mail message from Aug. 13, 1997, from IBM's John M. Thompson, senior vice president and software group executive, to Sun's chief executive, Scott McNealy.
The E-mail said, in part, that Sun and IBM "must deliver on Java's promise. We must minimize the performance gap between Microsoft's implementation [of Java] and the implementation shipping with Netscape's Navigator. We must engage our other partners to bundle Navigator and/or Java-compatible JVMs with their products," Thompson wrote to McNealy. "We should start with Oracle and Novell. Novell ships 20 million NetWare clients per year."
Thompson concluded the memo with: "I will call [Novell Chief Executive] Eric Schmidt if you will call [Oracle Chief Executive] Larry Ellison to start the conversations. Perhaps Larry could help us with Apple."
Holley then asked the court whether it was appropriate for six of the largest software companies in the world "to work together collectively, to collude against Microsoft."
When the government's attorney, Steven Houck, objected to Holley's question, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson sustained the objection.
Holley then turned back to IBM's Soyring and pointed out that the combined revenue of the six companies in question would eclipse Microsoft's.
"Yes, except in market capitalization," Soyring responded.
Holley also entered into evidence an E-mail from May 1, 1998, from IBM Internet strategist Rodney Smith to John Kannegaard, Sun's vice president and general manager of the Java platform. The message referred to Sun Chief Operating Officer Ed Zander's plans for areas where Sun and IBM might collaborate on products.
Specifically, Zander outlined possibilities for the companies to work together on hardware, middleware and operating system software.
"Ed laid out a proposal for us to partner on Solaris/Intel, though dropping SCO," Smith wrote to Kannegaard. "We agreed to put a couple of folks to see how we could settle on a road map for a converged Solaris/AIX/SCO. Ed outlined Sun's positions not to get into the database business [or] systems management," Smith wrote.
Holley asked Soyring whether the E-mail referred to an agreement Sun had with IBM not to enter the database business, where IBM's DB/2 competes, or the systems management area, where IBM's Tivoli subsidiary competes. Soyring said he did not know.
Judge Jackson called the attorneys for both sides to the bench, and the court went into recess.
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