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To: Bearded One who wrote (20647)	8/10/1998 8:56:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

You'll have to check with resident Atty. Lampton, Bearded One. My reading was that Bill was acting as his own lawyer all along. As to strategy, I'd say there's a good chance they're playing to the appeals court, as Gerald has said in the past. The "Chicago School" argument doesn't seem to be prominent in the current strategy, but I'm sure it'll come up later. Given how the appeals court seemed to bend over backward to pat Bill on the back the first round, there's a good chance Microsoft will do fine there, though there's still this matter of "finding facts", which I don't believe can be overturned on appeal. I'd guess, though, that the 2 Reaganauts on the Appeals Panel may be out ahead of the Supreme Court in their willingness to throw out antitrust law. I'm sure Rehnquist, Scalia, and Scalia's lap dog Thomas would be happy to go along, but that's not enough. The rest of the court seems a little more reticent about overturning existing law on a whim. And who knows, maybe Randolph will look up what his old mentor Bork has to say on the current matter. All I'll say about Microsoft's strategy is that Intel's makes more sense to me. Let the lawyers handle it, most people wouldn't know it was going on in the first place. Bill seems to think he must be free to intimidate the DoJ too. "You can have me for 8 hours, not a minute more. You want to depose 15 guys? I'll give you 8.". I figure Bois will probably come in for Bill's deposition. I'd like to be a fly on the wall for that one. "Random isn't a legal term, Mr. Gates. The law doesn't recognize 'beyond bizzarre' as a legal defense." Cheers, Dan.

To: Bearded One who wrote (20647)	8/15/1998 6:35:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Better NetWare late than NT never infoworld.com I haven't been posting much from the infoworld brigade of the press division of the nefarious international ilk conspiracy lately, but I thought Bearded One at least would enjoy this piece. This is (editor I think) Michael Vizard, who tends to bend over backward to be fair to Microsoft, really- I don't recall posting much of his stuff. He notes that Novell's delivery of Netware 5 may mark a major detour on the road to Windows World. Sounds good to me, though I can't say too much about that personally, I've always disavowed knowledge of Novell. This means that for the foreseeable future, we can expect to see heterogeneous, multitier enterprise computing architectures dominating the IT landscape. NetWare will continue to be the dominant provider of file and print services, Unix and mainframe systems will continue to host most of the data, and NT 4.0 will be used as the primary platform for application servers that need low- to medium-range scalability. The bad news for Redmond is that the company's Uber-NT vision overall, also known as Microsoft's Digital Nervous System, is pretty much kaput without a credible NT 5.0 story to back it up. And once more, by the time Microsoft gets around to delivering NT 5.0, most IT shops will be pretty comfortable with multitier computing architectures. So the promise of a homogenous NT infrastructure won't seem quite as compelling in 2001. Well, that's fine for DNS, but what about the more insidious DNA retrovirus, lurking in a water supply near you? At least I'm starting to see the DNA/DNS distinction, DNA= 8500+ Windows APIs for the world to standardize on (all "open" in some Microsoftese sense, I'm sure), DNS= one morbidly obese middleware OS for everyone, to run those 8500+ Windows APIs on. Or maybe it's still beyond the comprehension of mere mortals, and only Bill knows what it really means. They're his "initiatives", you know. Anyway, the somewhat garbled conclusion: So the question is, has Microsoft been humbled enough to start doing the right thing to support IT diversity, or are is the company merely taking a more practical approach with tools such as Visual Studio 6.0 as it waits for the next available opportunity in the new millennium? I'm sure Microsoft will do "the right thing", in some neologistic sense of the phrase anyway. Cheers, Dan.