History continued (early draft)

A brief history of Microsoft - Part II

Table of Contents

Innovation…Yeah right!

This is an article written by Rob Landley, April 19, 2000…but nothing has changed, so it is reproduced here.!

“Microsoft isn't good with technology. The company's development efforts are an incredibly inefficient waste of resources, made marginally workable by throwing insane amounts of money at them. They can't even ship their core product, the operating system, on time. You all know Windows 2000 shipped three years late, but did you know Windows 95 did as well? Microsoft called it Windows 95 because it expected to release annual upgrades, yet the next version wasn't Windows 96 or Windows 97 but Windows 98. And 98 was yet another DOS-based operating system (it still runs the OS they bought from Seattle Computer Products, good old 16-bit DOSi, under the covers), although Microsoft has promised after every single version they've released since Windows 3.1 that there will be no more DOS-based versions, that they'll make NT a viable option for everybody. Three guesses what their next consumer OS, "Windows ME," runs under the covers...

Despite their relentless repetition of the mantra of "innovation," the only product Microsoft has EVER actually innovated is "Microsoft BOB." You remember "BOB," the smiley face with sunglasses, in stores everywhere Christmas of 1995? The talking paperclip in Microsoft Word is one of the "virtual agents" from BOB. That's the ONLY innovation originating within Microsoft. I've asked people for over a year to e-mail me if they can think of another, and nobody has yet.

Their first ever product, BASIC, was an implementation of an existing public domain technology. Their breakthrough product, DOS, they bought from Seattle Computer Products. PowerPoint they bought as a start-up. Word was a copy of WordPerfect, just as Excel was a copy of Lotus 1-2-3. Their SQL database they got from Sybase. Flight Simulator was bought from SubLogic in 1981. The Internet was first brought to Windows 3.1 by Trumpet Winsock, and their Web browser started with technology from Spyglass and added features copied from Netscape. Windows 2000's big advantages? Well, they say it doesn't crash as much. Oh, and Active Directory, was copied from Novell. Microsoft's critics keep track of this sort of thing, don’t you know...

Microsoft has consumed many business partners in its search for growth beyond market saturation of the PC software market, but it buys products rather than people. Robert Cringely's article about the aftermath of Microsoft's acquisition of Hotmail explains why developers of purchased companies seldom choose to stay with Microsoft. The result is that the Windows software market has become a virtual wasteland. Ask yourself, are there more boxes of Windows software in stores today, or have all the software developers instead switched to designing ever more powerful websites? Even the game market has largely switched over to writing software rather than selling hardware (Sega and Nintendo), and games are very important in driving the growth of PC hardware. Who is going to buy a 3000 megahertz processor to read e-mail?

Microsoft's attempts to diversify away from Windows are hampered by the way it runs everything else it acquires into a defence of its monopoly. There's no reason why Word couldn't be ported to Linux, except that Microsoft won't do it. Its monopoly is a golden albatross, making it relatively unprofitable to even think about investing in anything else. Microsoft knows what's coming, as the leaked Microsoft internal research reports dubbed the "Halloween Documents" demonstrate. But Microsoft can't do anything about it; its corporate culture locks it in. An antitrust breakup could be Microsoft's only hope, freeing up the company to think about other alternatives. But this doesn't mean the fallout from the trial won't be extremely painful in other ways.

Microsoft has never had to survive without a monopoly. It was founded on the idea of creating a monopoly. When Bill Gates and Paul Allen proposed partnering to create their first product, a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, they were already afraid they were too late. Not to sell a product, but to lock out any possible competition. Literally, those two would not have gone into business if they hadn't believed they could attain a monopoly.

IBM survived the loss of its monopoly because it had earned it in the first place. IBM may have been a little rusty, but it still had the skills that made it great in the first place. Microsoft has never had to fend for itself in that way. A truly competitive environment is simply anathema to Microsoft, but like it or not, that's what the market is demanding. And the customer is always right.”

Since this article was written Microsoft has acquired Visio and assimilated it into the Office Suite. It has also acquired more than one CRM software company with software that competes with each other in that market!...nothing has changed.

In addition, the 1998 Halloween documents came to light. This was a confidential memorandum on potential strategies relating to free software, open-source software, and to Linux in particular that confirmed that Microsoft really fears the Open Source movement and sees Linux as a viable threat.

In 2007, Comes V Microsoft discovered an email from Bill Gates written 1999, whining about how Microsoft were doing all the work and Linux was gaining from it. He was referred to MS work on the ACPI standard and was hoping to establish a technology that would make ACPI work better with Windows than with Linux.

In 2008, the Foxconn Debacle indicates that the BIOS of foxconn mothboards favours Windows over Linux even though the ACPI standards are not operating system specific.

Competition…Yeah right!

This list needs some editing…but serves as a record of unsavoury business practices:

DOS and Windows both contain code originally written by Digital Research for CP/M. In fact, DOS is a CP/M clone, re-compiled for the 16-bit microcomputer.

"on July 24, 1996, Caldera Inc. filed a private Federal Antitrust Lawsuit against Microsoft Corp. for alleged illegal activities and unfair practices in the marketing of MS-DOS and its successors, including Windows 95 and Windows 98, both of which are still Digital Research CP/M at their essential core. The lawsuit was settled out of court in January 2000 at which time Microsoft Corporation agreed to certain terms and paid certain funds to Caldera Inc."

CP/M: The First PC Operating System [maxframe.com]

Visual Basic was derived from the work of Alan Cooper (aka, "The Father of Visual Basic"), who had created a new Windows shell he called, "Tripod." Microsoft bought Tripod from Alan Cooper and code named it, "Ruby."

Why I am called "the Father of Visual Basic" [cooper.com]

File compression had a rough birth into Microsoft's official OS distribution. Originally, Microsoft did not offer any data compression utilities, but several other companies did. One company, named, "Stac," lent their disk compression utility for Microsoft to evaluate. Microsoft included Stac's code in MS-DOS 6.0, but Stac sued, claiming that there was no licensing agreement for distribution (IBM also included Stac's code in PC-DOS, but they had a distribution license, and so were not sued). The two companies settled out of court. Microsoft initially pulled its disk compression software off the market, but then returned it after the settlement.

MICROSOFT DEFEATS DR-DOS BY:

- Fraud: Windows displays a warning about DR-DOS that MS knows is false.

- FUD: The DR-DOS evidence includes Microsoft memos planning the FUD campaign.

- Sabotage: Windows 3.0 beta has secret calls to prevent it from running on DR-DOS.

http://www.winnetmag.com/Article/ArticleID/19073/19073.html

http://tv.ksl.com/index.php?nid=5&sid=29450

- Sabotage: MS purposely keeps DR-DOS out of the Windows Beta-test program (also documented by evidence).

MICROSOFT DEFEATS GEOWORKS BY:

- Sabotage: New MS-DOS release causes Geoworks to fail.

MICROSOFT DEFEATS WORDPERFECT BY:

- Fraud: MS publicly announces that OS/2 is the future direction.

- Sabotage: MS provides WordPerfect with faulty Windows APIs.

MICROSOFT DEFEATS STACKER (Disk Compression) BY:

- Fraud: Microsoft incorporates the Stacker code, even the comments. MS lawyers drag out their defence of the suit against them until Stacker is bankrupt, then settle when the company has been forced out of business.

MICROSOFT DEFEATS OS/2 BY:

- Fraud: Microsoft pretends to support OS/2, then abandons it.

- FUD: Microsoft pays people to disparage OS/2 in posts in forums, letters to the editor, etc.

- Suspected Theft: Microsoft is believed to have borrowed OS/2 IP to use in Windows 3.1.

- Suspected Sabotage: Microsoft is believed to have provided less than their best code for OS/2.

MICROSOFT DEFEATS AMIPRO BY:

- Sabotage: Windows 95 causes AmiPro function-keys to break.

MICROSOFT DEFEATS NETSCAPE BY:

- Contract Interference: Microsoft pays sites to stop using Netscape (thus "cutting off Netscape's air supply").

- Extortion: Microsoft threatens VARs who preload Netscape.

- Extortion: Microsoft threatens Apple with the cancellation of MS Office for the Mac, unless Apple drops Netscape.

MICROSOFT ATTEMPTS TO DEFEAT JAVA BY:

- Sabotage: Microsoft tries to "kill cross-platform Java by growing the polluted [J++] Java market."

- Fraud: Microsoft memo shows plan to keep quiet about the incompatibilities so that J++ users will unintentionally create Windows-only code.

AND NOW MICROSOFT IS ATTEMPTING TO DEFEAT LINUX BY:

- Fud: Obviously.

- Fraud: False claims, planted by partners like Toqueville.

- Legal Attacks: Microsoft indirectly funded the SCO attack

- Patents: Future.

- Legislation: DRM

- Proprietary Internet Protocols: MS Multimedia formats, .Net authentication protocols, DRM.

- Secret Hardware Protocols: Working with partners like NVidia (closed source drivers), ATI (closed source drivers), and AMD (the unpublished memory-access fix).

- Locking-in Linux: Working with partners like NVidia and ATI (closed source drivers), possibly Trolltech (the proprietary version of Qt, Qt support for .Net), possibly CodeWeavers (promoting MS Office on Linux, and ActiveX on the Internet), possibly Xandros and a couple of other Linux distributors (proprietary Linux admin tools, Qt-only desktop environment, promoting MS Office on Linux, etc.), possibly Macromedia (Flash), and who knows who else.

- Infiltration: MS plants joining Open Source projects to cause interference, wearing out the leaders through constant complaining, driving away other developers by acting like jerks, pushing the project in bad directions, etc.

- Infiltration: MS plants joining Open Source projects and pretending to be die-hard supporters, then pushing for overly-tight licensing, convincing others to add special restrictions that limit the software's use (possible examples: DotGNU, XFree86), using LGPL for what should be BSD (CodeWeaver's Wine), using GPL for what should be LGPL (MySQL), and so on.

Patent Rips

Video Encoding

Microsoft loses antitrust, patent infringement, restraint of trade, and breach of contract cases (Burst v. Microsoft) and has settled out of court on more than one occasion (People of Iowa v. Microsoft). Some of these cases uncovered apparent destruction of evidence and other under-hand tactics.

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist and a morally corrupt organization with seemingly little corporate responsibility.

Security…Yeah right!

Try googling "trustworthy computing". Need I say more?

Futurist…Yeah right!

You might want to check out Bills 2002 predictions on Tablet PCs being the most common PC in five years time. Bill Gates is perhaps, not the best person to be selling us the future. Other famous predictions include "640Kb is more than enough" and "The Internet is a toy", and "pen computing will replace desktops", yeah, that's a good one.

Other quotable thoughts from the Internet include comments about Bill Gates generosity with other peoples money…Bill never donated a dime to any charity until he married Melinda. What does that tell you? Perhpas Bill is still the stingy bastard he always was but Melinda is a much better person.

Of course, being generous with your ill-gotten gains isn't exactly a saintly act. It's like the godfather of the mafia donating to an orphanage. All well and good for the orphanage. Not so good for all the victims of the mafia. Or Standard Oil or any other convisted monopolist.

And in case anybody thinks I'm going over the top with my comparison of Bill to the godfather of the mafia, let's not forget that after their convistion, Microsoft has been sued twice by the US DOJ and once by the EU for anti-competitive abuse of their monopoly. They settled once with the US (the terms of which they subsequently broke) and was found guilty by the EU and the US on the two other occasions. This is a company that lies to the court, destroys those companies they can't compete with, and they have been found guilty on more than one occasion of code theft, patent abuse, industrial espionage, and deceptive business practices.

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist that has been harming the industry for decades. Imagine how far computing could have progressed by now if Microsoft wasn't in such a position of power. We had ubiquitous GUIs in 1984 (AmigaOS, MacOS, GEM, GeOS) but it wasn't until *1995* that a similar level of GUI quality reached the market, thanks to Microsoft. That's 11 years of progress, lost, thanks to the power hungry ambitions of the talentless half of the original Microsoft duo (Paul Allen excluded, Bill was always second-rate).

Bill doesn't get to wipe his slate clean just because he's spreading around his ill-gotten loot. He needs to apologize for screwing this industry over for two decades. And he also needs to apologize for that self-serving book he wrote, in which he managed to totally dismiss the importance of the Internet, leading to an unannounced *rewrite* of the book (2nd edition) so he wouldn't look like such a myopic moron to future generations. He's a bad person. Screwing Netscape I can live with. But rewriting history is just... disgusting.

… For hard facts, see transcripts of the antitrust trials. They will inform exactly which tactics made Microsoft guilty of abusing their monopoly position. Then look at the industry and observe how little has changed.

Are OEM computer manufacturers allowed to ship computers with desktop icons for competitors products but not for Microsoft products?

Have file formats and network protocol APIs been made freely available for interoperation?

Are userland applications still being bundled into core system libraries?

Are they using APIs which are not documented and thus not available to makers of competing products?...

… Ummm what does this refer to. I hear this crap a lot, but there is usually no hard findings to back it up. All I normally get is IE vs. Netscape, or some reference to "The Pirates of Silicon Valley". Hard facts from a made for TV movie. lol.

Well IE vs. Netscape isn't from a TV show, it's reality. Perhaps you weren't paying attention when it all happened, or weren't on the net then, but MS really did leverage their Windows monopoly and IE to drive Netscape's business into the gutter. It wasn't just giving IE away for free, after all a free product that sucks won't always win the market-place. It was exclusive deals with OEMs not allowing them to have Netscape pre-installed on machines, it was Windows making it easier and easier to use IE, at the same time making it harder to use Netscape. Sometimes you had to hold your tongue right and hope it was the correct phase of the moon to get Netscape to be the default browser, and even then every time you applied a security update of any kind you were likely to find IE had been mysteriously changed to your default browser again. Windows at least seemed to become less tolerant of Netscape running on it, while IE was unstable and crashed a lot, Netscape started crashing MORE after MS decided they wanted the browser market. Can I PROVE that MS intentionally made Windows crash more if it saw Netscape running? No, but I witnessed the events, and found myself eventually forced to give up on running Netscape because IE crashed my computers less, not because I thought it was a superior browser. I seriously doubt that Netscape started coding their browser worse after IE was competing with them.

There's also the current issue with Windows Media Player. Tried to find anything else out there to compete with it? Quicktime and Real both don't work quite right with formats outside their native ones. I spent a week hunting for an alternative media player with AVI and Mpeg files that I could do playlists with at one point. Even though I found one to meet my needs, it amounted to nothing more than a skin over Windows Media Player, as WMP did all the decoding and playback underneath. Media Player also conveniently doesn't support codecs other than MS-approved ones. While it will play DivX, XviD, etc, you have to put in the work yourself to find the codecs, install them, and so on. Not surprisingly most mainstream sites don't use those codecs for any video. (And I'm talking about the current versions of DivX which are legit and not hacked versions.) This quite effectively kills the market for alternate codecs. When's the last time you saw a computer from an OEM arrive with RealOne and/or Quicktime already installed? I haven't seen one yet myself, and given past history, I would not be surprised to find that MS is making sure it doesn't happen with their OEM agreements. Again I can't prove that, since OEM agreements are subject to confidentiality agreements. Handy how that works.

Microsoft also has used its OEM agreements to try to stifle Linux, at least in the past. It did come out during the whole DOJ trial process that MS had forbid OEMs to have computers dual-boot on shipment at one point. Even if an OEM wanted to install dual OSs, the customer would have to put in the work to make it possible to boot into anything other than Windows. XP will (at least sometimes) overwrite your MBR where LILO (or whatever loader you use) is, forcing your computer back to single-boot, MS-only status. And try to buy a computer from an OEM, even a local one, without the OS on. You can get Windows on it for around $100, or you can pay around $100 labour. Either way you pay the same price for the computer, effectively making you pay for Windows even if you don't get it. I ran into this first back around 1998. The guy at the place admitted to me it was due to their MS OEM agreement. I ended up getting Windows on the machine and wiping it, I figured I might as well get the bloody software if I had to pay for it no matter what, even if I didn't use it…

Amazing quote from Slashdot

"I sat in a meeting yesterday with "developers" who had never heard of Bachus-Naur form. I routinely confer with "programmers" who have never heard of a finite state machine. I work daily with "data architects" who have never heard of Dr. Codd or of normalization. I am personally acquainted with upper managers who are just dying to replace OpenBSD-based firewalls with M$ Vista Server. THIS, my fellow cognoscenti, is the extent to which our society is infested with charlatans and ignorami. That M$ can now, on the one hand, generate security holes of arbitrary obscurity, and, on the other, miraculously detect and repair them far and away better than their erstwhile "competitors" is a final and apocalyptic testimonial to the supreme stupidity (I use the word advisedly, in the sense of "willful ignorance") of our omnipotent layers of corporate management. Wasn't it bad enough when M$ were the sole possessors of the Most Sacred A[PB]Is? Wasn't it awful enough that they were able to ignore even the most rudimentary dictates of software engineering with impugnity -- that the drooling imbeciles in management would keep right on paying vast sums of money for hideous deformities of Logic without batting an eyelash? Do they now get to rake in huge profits from "repairing" systemic defects of their own intentional manufacture? I am 41. I am tired and old. I have watched, like a Felliniesque "Sad Clown of Life," wave upon wave of utter inanity wash up on the vast, dead-whale-stinking beach of corporate and academic IT. I have seen too much. I can cry no more. I want to know how to stop caring now. How, for the love of God, do I join the endless ranks of these gibbering fools who never think one picometer beyond their golf handicaps? How, for the bleeding love of the pumping, pulsating heart of Jesus Christ on a pogo stick do I just sit in meetings daydreaming about jumping into my big yellow H2 and driving back to my prefab McMansion in the burb-sprawl and staining my redwood deck with Johnson's WaterSeal? Why oh why must I KNOW that the imminent deaths of such elegancies as Tru64 Unix and MIPS and Alpha are a sin against art and science and technology and Man? Can't I just be stupid too? What's so wrong with me? What have I done? Why must I suffer so? One day, my friends, we will all lounge in paradise happily signing off on million-dollar purchases of Microsoft AntiVirus Protection(TM) with huge idiotic grins upon our faces and lovely oblivious strings of rancid drool dangling from our chins. We will not be tormented by the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Our eyes will bear the brilliant, unfocused glow of perfect, orgasmic stupidity. Until then, we must work to balance our egregious karma. Can there be any doubt whatever that we fried and devoured living human babies in each of our wretched previous incarnations? What more glaring evidence can there be of our complete, total, and inherent evil? We sinners must needs endure the terrible, sadistic wrath of a cold and childish god. May he soon tire of so gleefully tormenting us. Amen. Railgun Sally"

… From birth, William Gates III was a millionaire. (Trust fund from wealthy parents). The lowest net-worth he's ever experienced is greater than the highest an average American can ever expect…

I hesitate to call Gates a true philanthropist, as I remember how he was highly criticized by others for not doing much. Finally he started doing more philanthropy, but it took a lot of public humiliation to get him to. Perhaps I'm wrong, but the way it all came about it looks like Gates is just giving away money to save face, not because he truly believes in or cares about any of the causes he gives to.

The guy was the son of a wealthy lawyer. Went to an elite prep school then to Harvard, with all bills paid by Daddy.

Bio

Family and Early Childhood

Bills Dad On October 28, 1955, shortly after 9:00 p.m., William Henry Gates III was born. He was born into a family with a rich history in business, politics, and community service. His great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent lawyer. [Wallace, 1992, p. 8-9] Early on in life, it was apparent that Bill Gates inherited the ambition, intelligence, and competitive spirit that had helped his progenitors rise to the top in their chosen professions. In elementary school he quickly surpassed all of his peer's abilities in nearly all subjects, especially math and science. His parents recognized his intelligence and decided to enroll him in Lakeside, a private school known for its intense academic environment. This decision had far reaching effects on Bill Gates life. For at Lakeside, Bill Gates was first introduced to computers.

Bill and his two sisters grew up in Seattle. Their father, William H. Gates II, is a Seattle attorney. Mary Gates (nee Dworkin), their late mother, was a schoolteacher, University of Washington regent and chairwoman of United Way International.

Gates attended public elementary school before moving on to the private Lakeside School in North Seattle. It was at Lakeside that Gates began his career in personal computer software, programming computers at age 13.

In 1973, Gates entered Harvard University as a freshman, where he lived down the hall from Steve Ballmer, who is now Microsoft's president. While at Harvard, Gates developed a version of the programming language BASIC for the first microcomputer - the MITS Altair. BASIC was first developed by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz at Dartmouth College in the mid-1960s Paul Allen(see above). In his junior year, Gates dropped out of Harvard to devote his energies full-time to Microsoft, a company he had started in 1975 with his boyhood friend Paul Allen. Guided by a belief that the personal computer would be a valuable tool on every office desktop and in every home, they began developing software for personal computers.

Paul Allen left Microsoft due to ill-health .

Bill GatesUnder Gates' leadership, Microsoft's mission is continuously to advance and improve software technology, and to make it easier, er, well kind of, only he can crush the competition without getting sued…again.

Gates was married on Jan. 1, 1994, to Melinda French Gates. The couple has three children: a daughter, Jennifer Katharine Gates, born in 1996; and a son, Rory John Gates, born in 1999 and a daughter, Phoebe Adelle Gates, born in 2002.

Following article Published: March 24, 2004 NYT

The same week the EU announced a 500-600million euro penalty against MS…

Even as Microsoft prepares to face penalties from the European Union, which accuses the company of abusing the Windows monopoly, new details about the tactics Microsoft used to secure a dominant position in software markets for nearly two decades are emerging in a state courthouse in Minneapolis.

Testimony during the second week of trial in the consumer class-action lawsuit in Minnesota has revealed some embarrassing internal documents from Microsoft which were not disclosed in the bitter 1997 federal antitrust lawsuit that focused on the company's attempt to control the browser markets in the 1990's.

Among the documents introduced in court this week was a letter from June 1990 in which Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, told Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel at the time, that any support given to the Go Corporation, a Silicon Valley software company, would be considered an aggressive move against Microsoft.

Other evidence presented by the plaintiffs' lawyers at trial yesterday gave an account of how Microsoft violated a signed secrecy agreement with Go and showed that Microsoft possessed technical documents from Go that it should not have had access to.

A Microsoft spokeswoman said that many of these newly disclosed documents were not relevant to the trial, which focuses on Microsoft pricing actions.

"These are very old documents, taken out of context for the sole purpose of obscuring the real issue of this case," said Stacy Drake, the Microsoft spokeswoman.

But lawyers for the plaintiffs contend that the documents show how Microsoft unfairly dominated the market. "All of Microsoft's conduct was designed to acquire and hang on to their monopoly,'' said Eugene Crew, a lawyer at Townsend, Townsend & Crew, based in San Francisco. "Consumers were harmed by being deprived of choice. The greatest harm out of the Go story was the suppression of innovation and new technology by Microsoft."

Microsoft has already paid $1.6 billion in its efforts to settle consumer antitrust claims filed in 10 states.

The new lawsuit, which contends that Microsoft overcharged Minnesota customers from 1994 to 2001, seeks almost $500 million from the company. If the company, based in Redmond, Wash., loses, it could also be forced to pay triple that amount under Minnesota state law.

This week, the lawyers representing the Minnesota consumers are focusing on Microsoft's efforts to undercut Go, a start-up company that was developing an operating system for hand-held computers.

The first witness appearing at the trial yesterday was Jerry Kaplan, the co-founder of Go. Mr. Kaplan, who was a software developer at the Lotus Development Corporation before he started Go, has been a longtime opponent of Microsoft.

Yet he said he was surprised by what was revealed about Microsoft's activities in the documents. "I was shocked," Mr. Kaplan said in a telephone interview. "This was a corporate mugging that went uncorrected and unknown."

The events surrounding the failure of Go have often been cited as a reason for the animosity between Silicon Valley executives and Microsoft. Go was one of the most prominent efforts by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to create software for tablet-sized devices. In addition to an all-star cast of technologists, the start-up had backing from major industry players like IBM, Intel and AT&T.

The plaintiffs contend the new documents show that Microsoft violated nondisclosure agreements with Go, and then used that information to build PenWindows, a competitor to Go's PenPoint operating system. The documents included Microsoft's internal e-mail messages showing that it had detailed knowledge of Go's product plans.

The documents also suggest that Microsoft sought to pressure Intel to cancel its plans to invest in Go. On June 28, 1990, Mr. Gates wrote a letter to Mr. Grove trying to convince the Intel executive that he should back a version of Windows for portable computers, then code-named Windows-H, rather than Go's PenPoint software.

"I guess I've made it very clear that we view an Intel investment in Go as an anti-Microsoft move, both because Go competes with our systems software and because we think it will weaken the 386 PC standard," Mr. Gates wrote.

Shortly after the letter was written, according to Mr. Kaplan, Intel reduced its planned investment in Go from $10 million to $2 million, and stipulated the investment be kept a secret.

An Intel spokesman declined to comment on the events.

Silicon Valley executives said that Microsoft's aggressive behaviour in the early 1990's led to a widespread belief among technology companies that Microsoft was using its operating system monopoly and unfair tactics to compete in markets where its technology was inferior.

Microsoft was well aware of this perception, and in 1991 tried to alter the way the company was viewed.

In a document titled "Microsoft Criticism," the company's outside public relations consultants recommended training for its executives on "personal demeanour and style." The advice read in part that the focus should be shifted from "killing the competitor" to "providing a better solution to the customer's problems."

"It's a bit of artifact, but in its day it was a good memo," said Marianne Allison, an executive at Waggner Edstrom, Microsoft's longtime public relations firm.

In late 1993, Go was sold to AT&T where it was ultimately merged into the company's portable computer subsidiary. In 1994 the phone company shut down the effort in portable computing. Three months later Microsoft canceled its PenWindows project.

In 1996, Mr. Kaplan wrote a book, "Start-Up: A Silicon Valley Adventure" (Penguin USA), in which he blamed Microsoft, in part, for the demise of Go. Two years later, Marlin Eller, a former Microsoft programmer who was part of the PenWindows project, wrote in "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" (Owl Books) that the intent of the PenWindows project had been primarily to undermine Go.

Appendix A: BASIC

I’d like to recognize the remarkable John Kemeny, who died in 1992 after a long career as administrator, mathematician, computer language inventor, and most important (to him) teacher. Read the tribute at http://math.dartmouth.edu/history/TBasic/. Thanks also to Basic co-inventor Thomas Kurtz. I also give credit to Alan Cooper, sometimes known as the “Father of Visual Basic,” although the language actually had (and has) many parents—perhaps too many.

…Dr. John G. Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz developed the BASIC language at Dartmouth in 1964. BASIC stood for "Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code". Their objective: to create a simplified computer language for teaching students how to program.

Ten years later; before Gates and Allen recognized that the compact design of BASIC made it ideal for the limitations of the first personal computers so they pirated a copy of BASIC and ported in to the Altair. These early kits had extremely restricted memory and processing power even by today’s standards…

Appendix B: Browser War

First, a quick recap of the browser's history to put things in perspective….

Mozilla emerged in 1998, when the browser wars were in full swing and Netscape was scrambling to compete with Microsoft. Linux was hot at the time, and everyone was excited about the power and speed of open source development, so Netscape decided to set its browser free and released its Navigator code to the open source community.

The company put together the Mozilla team to act as a hub for all the development activities. The new technologies that emerged in the first few releases of Mozilla were also incorporated into Netscape 6 and 7. Developers and Web geeks alike were elated — we were getting newer and better browser versions every few months. In the summer of 2002, Mozilla finally hit its first major landmark, version 1.0. Other browsers using Mozilla's Gecko layout engine had begun to emerge as well.

Of course, Microsoft had a significant advantage: When users bought a new PC and wanted immediate access to the Internet, all they had to do was launch IE, which was sitting right there on their desktops. If a user was well-informed enough to know about Netscape (or even Mozilla), they still had to go to the browser's homepage, download it, and install it. And not a whole lot of people did that.

Netscape officially lost the browser war to Microsoft in the summer of 2003. Netscape's parent company, AOL Time Warner, announced that it was halting development of the Netscape browser and laying off dozens of developers. AOL also signed a licensing deal with Microsoft to use the IE browser across its entire line of connectivity services and applications.

At the same time, however, AOL Time Warner gave one big push to open source browser development. The company invested US$2 million in the brand new Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization that would helm further development of the Mozilla suite. With Netscape Navigator effectively dead and Mozilla now fully independent of AOL's grasp, the Mozilla team could concentrate on making a better browser.

Meanwhile, Apple made a big move with its January 2003 release of Safari, the Mac OS X browser based on the KHTML engine. Here was a browser that was fast, lightweight, and had killer features. All of a sudden, browser development was big news again.

With Safari, Apple succeeded in pushing browser development in the right direction. Safari renders pages faster than any other browser and its interface is ultra-minimal, yet it's still highly customisable. It also has features that significantly add to the user experience, such as a pop-up blocker, the SnapBack button, and the Google search bar. (I wrote about Safari on this site when it was announced, so feel free to read that article for more information.)

While Apple's been on Safari, the Mozilla Project has been keeping busy developing three different browsers: Mozilla Navigator aimed at corporates, the lightweight Firebird 0.7 now renamed Firefox 0.x, and the Mac OS X browser Camino. The development team seems to have been working extra hard on Mozilla 1.6, improving the tabbed browsing, adding a pop-up blocker, and incorporating a handy "find as you type" function that begins searching the loaded page for text as you type it. Mozilla 1.6 is still a little sluggish, but it renders pages more quickly than last October's 1.5 release. Most importantly, Mozilla's levels of Web standards compliance and compatibility are head and shoulders above Internet Explorer. These benefits plus speed and compatibility with most Mozilla plugins are what makes Firefox the browser of choice for Internet intelligentsia.

Bizarrely, Microsoft has announced that it has halted all development on Internet Explorer for the Mac, and the new version of IE for Windows won't be out until the company releases its next operating system, Longhorn, in 2005 or 2006 (or, knowing Microsoft, perhaps even deep into 2007).

Meanwhile, thanks to the momentum created by the open source movement, the Gecko engine and the front-end functionality of Mozilla's products will have improved significantly by then. And Internet Explorer users, tired of the "same old browser", might just start itching for change before Microsoft can deliver the new software. Maybe Mozilla, with its superior speed and standards compliance, will be enough to tempt them to weather the "pain" of download and installation -- a sacrifice that can take as little two minutes, especially as more and more people abandon dial-up connectivity for the wonders of cable modems and DSL.

Part II

http://www.informit.com/articles/printerfriendly.asp?p=174156

 Part III

Just to be completely anal, let's look at the IE timeline [microsoft.com]:

Appendix B: UNIX/Xenix/Linux/*NIX

Interesting side note for those following the SCO Linux /GPL debate…as you may know, Novell licensed its UnixWare platform to SCO in return for a waiver of various licensing impediments and revenues…however, here lies an oft forgotten history of Unix…

Xenix was Microsoft's version of UNIX for microprocessors. Microsoft called it Xenix because it could not license the "UNIX" name as it was already taken!

Microsoft purchased a license for UNIX 7th Edition from AT&T in 1979, and announced on August 25, 1980 that it would make it available for the 16-bit microcomputer market. Xenix was not sold directly to end users; Microsoft licensed it to computer manufacturers who then ported it to their systems. The first ports of Xenix were to the Zilog Z8001 16-bit processor.

Altos shipped a version for their computers early in 1982, Tandy Corporation shipped one for their 68000-based systems in January 1983, and Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) released their port to the Intel 8086 processor in September 1983.

Xenix varied from its 7th Edition origins by incorporating elements from BSD, and soon possessed the most widely installed base of any Unix flavour due to the popularity of the inexpensive x86 processor.

When Microsoft entered into an agreement with IBM to develop OS/2, it lost interest in promoting Xenix. Microsoft transferred ownership of Xenix to SCO in an agreement that left Microsoft owning 25% of SCO. However, Microsoft continued to use Xenix internally, submitting a patch to support functionality in UNIX to AT&T in 1987, which trickled down to the code base of both Xenix and SCO UNIX. Microsoft is said to have used Xenix on VAX minicomputers extensively within their company as late as 1992.

SCO released a version of Xenix for the Intel 286 processor in 1985, and following their port of Xenix to the 386 processor, renamed it SCO UNIX.

Novell subsequently exited the UNIX game by selling rights to its UNIXware to Caldera. Years later SCO would sue IBM for copyright infringements and Novell counter-sued to protect its own UNIX software patents that it had retained when it sold UNIXware to Caldera, who later became SCO. Reads like a bad soap opera (are there any good ones?).

Linux is a UNIX-like operating system that Linus Torvalds created. As a student in 1992, Linus was working on the MINIX operating system, and investigating POSIX standards for UNIX. In words that failed to foreshadow his own invention, Linus wrote in a newsgroup message:

“Hello, everybody out there using minix. I'm doing an (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat. It is NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-hard disks, as that's all I have :-(.”

In less than a decade from this humble beginning, and through the work of the open source communities, Linux bloomed into an enterprise-grade operating system spanning every popular IT hardware platform from all major vendors. Forces as large and diverse as Hewlett Packard, IBM and Sun have all embraced Linux as it pushes proprietary UNIX offerings to the sidelines.

Linux itself is just the operating system kernel, and it handles machine-primitive functions including task scheduling, memory management, I/O and other actions called upon by utilities and applications. By itself, the Linux kernel does not create a usable operating system. The rest of what is commonly referred to as "Linux" comes from other sources.

Linux "distributions" (often called 'distros') include a Linux kernel as well as many utilities and applications from the open source community. This community includes an Internet-based collection of individuals working on various software packages that work with the Linux kernel as well as other operating systems. In fact, most of the open source tools work equally well on Linux, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX and even Windows.

The oldest and most used of these open source packages come from the GNU (GNU is a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not Unix," and is pronounced "guano"). The GNU Project was launched in 1984 to develop a complete Unix-like tool set for multiple operating systems, and the Project shared Linus' preference for POSIX compliance. The GNU tools, as well as many other open source projects, create what you directly control in Linux. Building your own Linux operating system from all these different parts is possible, but hardly practical for individuals or even large IT organizations. To download each required package, confirm version dependencies, compile, and then load and test it, would be difficult for dozens of engineers.

Appendix C: Dr. Gary A Kildall

All of the products above would not have been possible without the valiant and brilliant work of the founder of Digital Research, the late Dr. Gary A. Kildall.  On July 11, 1994, Gary Kildall passed away following a blow to his head at the Franklin Street Bar & Grill in Monterey, California on July 8, 1994. At the time of his death, Gary was 52. He was born in 1942, a few years before the first electronic computer even existed, and his software made possible PC computing as we know it at the turn of the 20th century. He is survived by a son. Scott, and a daughter, Kristin, as well as his former wife, Dorothy Kildall, with whom Gary co-founded Digital Research, Inc. in 1974.

Gary created the first Operating System for the microprocessor, CP/M.  The most advanced current version of CP/M in 1999 is IMS Ltd. REAL/32.  CP/M also serves as the basis of all modern DOS versions including the outstanding Caldera DR DOS and other derivatives including PC-DOS from IBM, and MS-DOS from Microsoft, whose position in the computer industry is based on its unauthorized 1981 "cloning" of Dr. Gary Kildall's Digital Research CP/M, which gave birth to the IBM PC standard upon which Microsoft MS-DOS, Windows CE, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 2000 (now 2003, formerly NT) are based today.

On July 23, 1996, Caldera Inc. acquired the entire assets of Digital Research Inc. from Novell Inc. and on July 24, 1996 filed an Antitrust Lawsuit against Microsoft Corporation.  The Final Version of this suit was ultimately settled in Caldera's favour in January 2000 prior to going to trial in Utah. Hopefully, some justice will finally be achieved.  Gary never wanted to file suit against Microsoft because he always believed that in the end excellence in programming would win in the marketplace.  We continue Gary's belief, and now must come a public awareness of the truth and a desire for justice must awaken to make the vision of an open and exciting software industry where many companies can flourish equally a reality.

Appendix D: Microsoft Java Settlement

http://programming.newsforge.com/programming/04/04/08/0524247.shtml

Above link also has notes regarding MS propping up Apple and the after-effects

See also:

http://programming.newsforge.com/programming/04/04/07/2021242.shtml

See also Microsoft Long Playing Business Record referring to their continued us of litigation to avoid monopolistic restrictions (http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040413.gtmsoft0413/BNStory/Technology/)