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Technology Stocks : MSFT Internet Explorer vs. NSCP Navigator -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (20973)	9/14/1998 8:55:00 PM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

Microsoft saw Java as its 'biggest threat,' judge's memo reveals zdnet.com That nutty judge still doesn't understand about "colorful language" and "relatively junior employees". Oh well. According to Jackson's ruling, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates on May 26, 1995 wrote in an e-mail that "the Netscape/Java combination threatens to "commoditize' the operating system." He can't remember that. Jackson cited other government exhibits showing that following a 1997 meeting with Gates, Microsoft's Ben Slivka described Java as "the biggest threat to Microsoft," writing in an e-mail to Gates that "clearly the work the Java team is doing has hit a raw nerve with you." Slivka was just being a commie again. Jackson also cited a memo by Microsoft Vice President Jeff Raikes that says "the situation is threatening our operating system and desktop applications share at a fundamental level" and "Netscape pollution must be eradicated." Another one of those junior employees. Pretty colorful language, though. Other evidence mentioned in the ruling claims that Gates was the alleged leader in the "charge to wrest control of Java from Sun" and cites an August 25, 1997 e-mail sent by Microsoft's Tod Nielsen to Bill Gates saying, "We are just proactively trying to put obstacles in Sun's path and get anyone who wants to write in Java to use Microsoft's J/Direct." Bill can't remember anything about that either. Jackson noted that the government's case hinges on "contemporaneous statements of Microsoft executives" to support its claims. For example, Jackson pointed to an e-mail sent by Moshe Dunie, a Microsoft vice president, to Gates and several other executives: "The stunning insight is this: To make consumers switch away from Netscape, we need to make them to upgrade sic toWindows 98 . . . We can leverage these assets to convert the Navigator installed base and eclipse Netscape's browser market share leadership. But if we rely on IE4 alone to achieve this, we will fail." Microsoft executive Christian Wildfeuer apparently agreed. In an e-mail sent on Feb. 24, 1997, he wrote: "It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the operating system asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator." Make people use IE instead of Navigator. That's choice for you. It's what the customers want! Microsoft taking us where we want to go! I got to stop now, the whole article is stuff I'd normally find quotable, but what the heck, ZD deserves the hits. Maybe Microsoft should sandbag the whole thing and just rely on the Chicago School interpretation of the D.C. circuit. We'll see. Cheers, Dan. P.S. A bit of good news for the 'softies at the bottom, though: Jackson did throw out one of the charges made by the states against Microsoft, saying a monopoly leveraging charge was inconsistent with the plain text of the Sherman Antitrust Act and Supreme Court pronouncements. The AP "objectively" lead with that one in their story: 1 Complaint About Microsoft Tossed nytimes.com

To: Daniel Schuh who wrote (20973)	9/15/1998 1:50:00 PM
From: Charles Hughes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 24154

>>> I just thought it interesting that there was TCP/IP development back then, even if primarily at the LAN level. It goes to intent. How can they have been really planning at that time as company policy to integrate a browser with Windows if they were still dragging their feet on the basic Internet protocols? Of course it doesn't prove that they weren't doing so before the 1994 consent decree. That would be possible. Not that that could not have been anticompetitive technology in either case. >>> I still haven't seen a date for when Microsoft actually shipped a Win3x Winsock TCP/IP. First one I saw that actually worked right with Suns and so forth was around 1993-1994, under WFW 3.11 and then I think NT 3.50, but I'm a little foggy on that. Winsock 1.1 was the first one that sucked less. >>> You thought OS/2 had some pretty good stuff in it, didn't you? Oui. E.G., what we know as Microsoft Networking today, with NT domains and security and Win95 peers/clients, was originally from OS/2, lock stock and barrel. They still interoperate, and for a long time (haven't tried it lately) you could use either OS/2 server or NT server as a domain controller on the same network and they would back each other up. This is the heart of the value of both systems, and had nothing to do with DEC or Cutler, AFAIK. At that time, though, they used Netbuie/Netbios, not TCP/IP, and were still fighting with Novell over whether MSFT could make clients with Novell capability. A long negotiation, since at that time Novell had 70-90 % of that market. IBM folks used to tell me how pissed they were that MSFT would constantly let down the side during latter technical development of OS/2. This stuff is in deja-vu and other news historical services. Speaking of anticompetitive intent, Novell had plenty of it then. Another was Sun. At one time you could buy a great networking system called TOPS, which would let you hook up your PC, your Sun, and your Macintosh, using Appletalk and/or TCP/IP (via Ethertalk), back in the late 1980s. Worked great. The wankers in Sun management, thinking this was killing their workstation sales because you could connect with a PC or Mac in terminal sessions (talk about not getting 'it'), bought TOPS out, and without even a decent interval, killed it and stuffed it into a hole in the basement. Because they had thus lost this opportunity to set in concrete their status as of that point as the server of choice, they left the field wide open for Novell and MSFT NT and OS/2. Cheers, Chaz