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``` [Microsoft is winning the war of public opinion for the simple reason that nobody -- neither the government nor Netscape nor the media -- has been explaining in plain language what Microsoft has done that's so wrong. "It's competition", an uninformed person might be forgiven for saying. "Everyone does it." Quoth, thus, a Minion of Bill, one who regards himself as a moderate, in a recent e-mail exchange:
... I don't think Microsoft's competitive behavior is out of the ordinary in this industry and this country. In fact, its behavior is to be expected in a free market set-up where competition is the touchstone. One can generalize your puzzlement [as to how people can work at Microsoft] to asking what possesses people to live and work in America, where individuality is prized above all else, communal living is an afterthought, and competing aggressively is a basic value. I find the question "How can you live with yourself working for corporate America" tougher to answer than "Why do you work for Microsoft?" Going to academia or a non-profit wouldn't change much, I think, since those institutions are also wrapped up in basic values of this society.
Notice the analogy between this passage and some of Microsoft's more official utterances on the subject of its security vulnerabilities:
Someone hacked into an older server carrying older code. We resolved the problem immediately, but it is the case that wherever software is in the world, someone will find a way into it. (Irish Times, 9/1/99)
This is a general issue, not a Microsoft issue. You can write a virus for any platform. (New York Times, 5/5/00)
In each case the speaker attempts to disassociate Microsoft from any responsibility for its behavior by reframing the issue in terms of a broader category -- corporate America in general, platforms in general, software in general. It's society that did it, not us. Notice how easy it is to refuse responsibility in the language of public relations. This language really is an attribute of corporate America in general -- I'll grant them that. Morality is going out of fashion, and now Microsoft has put its clout behind the trend.
For a reminder, then, of why so many in a very competitive industry
reserve a special dislike for Microsoft, see the enclosed message from
John Wharton. It originally appeared on Dave Farber's interesting-
people list, and I've reformatted it. For background on John Wharton
see
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Date: Sun, 14 May 2000 19:04:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: John Wharton
Dave--
I had to chuckle at Microsoft's response to the DoJ's proposed antitrust remedies; I wonder if anyone else noticed one delicious irony?
For years Microsoft has claimed there's a "Chinese Wall" separating the operating-systems division from the applications-software division. This is an intellectual-property firewall that supposedly makes sure different groups within Microsoft don't have an unfair advantage over outside competition by having access to unpublished interfaces or unannounced product plans. It also means different divisions can't collude in developing new products, Microsoft has said, and reassures other software companies they can share confidential information with one branch of the company without worrying that their trade secrets might be learned by a competing branch.
It doesn't always work that way. In his book "Startup", Jerry Kaplan tells how GO Corp. fell victim to the Chinese Wall gambit in 1989: Microsoft had approached GO, saying it wanted to develop apps to run under GO's new PenPoint operating system, but needed to know more about how PenPoint worked. GO agreed to share the requested information with Microsoft's applications group only after it signed an NDA assuring Kaplan that he "needn't worry about GO's confidential information jumping from the applications group to the operating systems group" [Kaplan's words].
Some months later Kaplan was shocked to discover that the very people he'd been dealing with actually worked on the development team for PenWindows, Microsoft's competing OS, and had used GO's proprietary information to clone the GO prototype. The apps-development story had been a ruse, Kaplan concluded, to let Microsoft "rip off" the GO design.
(See pp. 63-67, 101-102, 105-106, and 174-178 in the hard-bound edition of "Startup" for Kaplan's account of these dealings and excerpts from the non-disclosure agreements Microsoft violated.)
(Sound familiar? In 1980, Digital Research engineers shared design details of its CP/M-86 OS with Microsoft after MS said it was porting its compilers and applications suites to run on CP/M-86. In truth, the MS engineers Digital Research worked with were using the information to make sure MS-DOS capabilities would more closely match CP/M-86.)
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So now the DoJ has proposed that Microsoft be split in two to make sure future apps products will not in fact be able to take unfair advantage of knowledge of OS products and vice versa. In effect, the DoJ asked Judge Jackson to plug the holes and make the Chinese Wall more solid.
And how does Microsoft react to enforcing a policy the company says had been in effect all along? It screams bloody murder, claims there's no way the company can survive, much less continue to 'innovate', unless communications channels between the divisions remain wide open!
"These proposals would block us from doing new product work," Gates has said. "Microsoft could never have developed Windows under these rules. We couldn't have developed Windows because without the great work of the Office team and the Windows team, it never would have come together." (see the NYT, 4/29, pp.B1 & B5)
So much for the Chinese Wall theory!
And so much for any claims that Microsoft's control of the OS market played no role in advancing its interests in the applications arena.
(I laughed out loud to read that. Perhaps the brightest moment to come of this case since Microsoft attorneys tried to discredit an Intel VP during cross-examination and managed only to embarrass themselves! :-)
--john wharton ```
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