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Thread #: 1715

Why MS disappointed me to no end...

Madan

Thu Apr 25 11:37:50 2002

As most of you know, I work at the Miami Herald. It has some perks. For example, I know some of the writers that publish major stories and I usually chat wi them about their work.

One particular author has been writing an expose on MS antitrust and has obtained the MS intra-office emails.

I was really disappointed when he showed me some of them and included a couple in an article he published last week in the Miami Herald Business section.

FE, This is what Gates thinks about interoperability.

Allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we can do to the company,

Here's one on IE.

...but IE must be fully integrated into Windows as quickly as possible.  We must make sure that IE cannot and should not be removed from Windows easily and without harmful effects..


:boggle:

Wow.  I'm guessing most newspapers have had these quotes and others by now.  Gates spoke yesterday before the court.  I'm guessing it wasn't a comfortable experience to explain those emails.

m.

DrPizza

Thu Apr 25 15:42:30 2002

Quote: ...but IE must be fully integrated into Windows as quickly as possible.  We must make sure that IE cannot and should not be removed from Windows easily and without harmful effects..

Er, I agree.  Having IE part of the OS is excellent -- it provides a number of services that are immensely useful to third-party applications.

Quote: Allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we can do to the company,

Er... and?

If Steve jobs had said, "Allowing MacOS to run on other people's computers is one of the most destructive things Apple could do to the company.", would you get upset at it?

chrisale

Thu Apr 25 16:07:16 2002

Quote: ...but IE must be fully integrated into Windows as quickly as possible.  We must make sure that IE cannot and should not be removed from Windows easily and without harmful effects..

Wow, that leaves little doubt about that I guess...

Er, I agree.  Having IE part of the OS is excellent -- it provides a number of services that are immensely useful to third-party applications.

Sure, it provides a number of services... that's great.  But the issue is that he said IE "cannot and should not" be removed from the system.  That is obviously forcing people to use IE whether they want to or not...

If Gates said "the file system services provided by IE should not and cannot be removed from Window without serious harm to the system".  That's fine... that means you can keep some of the services that IE provides to Windows while not having to use IE as a web browser that competes directly with Netscape and others.

Quote: Allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we can do to the company,

This confuses me.  How is that destructive to the company?


If Steve jobs had said, "Allowing MacOS to run on other people's computers is one of the most destructive things Apple could do to the company.", would you get upset at it?

That's not a valid comparison at all.  A more accurate comparison would be if SJ said "Allowing Quicktime movies to be viewed on other peoples players is one of the most destructive...."

But of course, Quicktime is available for Windows... Appleworks documents can be viewed in other apps, iMovie, FCP, DSP and other Apple apps all use some sort of industry standard format that can be easily used by competing products.

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Thu Apr 25 16:12:00 2002

I kinda wondered why MS got involved in browsers in the first place.  I mean, they develop it, support it, update it and it doesn't create any revanue.

hmmmm.

Madan

Thu Apr 25 18:37:52 2002

chrisale is right.  This is a slimy set of emails under any definition.


Quote: Quote: ...but IE must be fully integrated into Windows as quickly as possible.  We must make sure that IE cannot and should not be removed from Windows easily and without harmful effects..


Er, I agree.  Having IE part of the OS is excellent -- it provides a number of services that are immensely useful to third-party applications.

A. I think it's great that IE can be used for many functions and that it's included in IE.

However, that email indicates that they were rushing to include IE deeply within MS Win. Why? Precisely to make it impossible for it to be easily removed.  No doubt having IE in Win is a boon, both for ppl to surf the web wiout dling a browser and for it's inexpensiveness(already included), however, tethering it to the OS, as a matter of survival was no doubt a means of attempting to failsafe against today.

It's obvious MS is conducting something inappropriate, with that email.


Quote: Quote: Allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other people's browsers is one of the most destructive things we can do to the company,


Er... and?

If Steve jobs had said, "Allowing MacOS to run on other people's computers is one of the most destructive things Apple could do to the company.", would you get upset at it?

Office files <> OS. chrisale is most correct in that respect. And semantics won't cut it.  Apple files are available for PC to read but MS won't have it.

MS refusing to have ineroperability by BROWSERS, much less the OS itself is a terrible abuse of its market position.

Hopefully, they'll be castigated.

M.

Magus

Thu Apr 25 19:18:15 2002

Do we have to go into the full "browser vs HTML engine" bit again?
Madan

Thu Apr 25 19:28:22 2002

Browser vs. HTML engine?

????

Browser == Netscape or Mozilla
HTML engine == Mosaic/zilla engine.

How exactly does that explain what went down in those emails?

M.

chrisale

Thu Apr 25 22:22:27 2002

That whole browser/HTML engine thing is bogus too.

To use Apple as an example.

If you need an HTML engine built-in to your OS for Help files or whatever, that's fine.  Apple does that in the form of the "Help Viewer".  Also, since every non-UNIX configuration file in MacOS X is an XML file, MacOS X has a built-in XML parser to deal with those files.

Those functions and services are provided by MacOS because they need to be there.

A Web browser does not inherently need to be installed on an Operating System.  I can delete Internet Explorer.app and every one of it's preference, library, and settings files and my system works fine.  If I delete explorer.exe and it's assosiated DLLs.  Windows dies.

That is a problem.  And it is obvious by this email that Gates *wanted* that to happen.

That is bad.  No two ways about it.

HitScan

Thu Apr 25 22:42:19 2002

If I delete explorer.exe and it's assosiated DLLs.  Windows dies.

Uh, what did you expect it to do? explorer.exe has been the shell for Windows since 95. When it didn't come with IE. Now, if you meant iexplore.exe and just had a typo, that's different. But yeah, you waste the big kahuna, and it's gonna die. :D

(Edited by HitScan at 7:48 am on April 26, 2002)

DuffMan

Thu Apr 25 23:31:02 2002

from chrisale posted at 5:22 pm on April 25, 2002


A Web browser does not inherently need to be installed on an Operating System.  I can delete Internet Explorer.app and every one of it's preference, library, and settings files and my system works fine.  If I delete explorer.exe and it's assosiated DLLs.  Windows dies.

That is a problem.  And it is obvious by this email that Gates *wanted* that to happen.

That is bad.  No two ways about it.

Windows has worked for me in 9x and 2000 without having explorer.exe, it's just a shell.

Anyway, MS is a business here people. They are trying to make the most amount of profit for their shareholders/owners. If they werent that mangement would be fired and replaced with someone who was. I'm still not sure exactly what laws they violated, except maybe coercing OEM manufacturers to do things a certain way, and even that is stretching the law.

Magus

Fri Apr 26 02:22:48 2002

from chrisale posted at 5:22 pm on April 25, 2002

MacOS X has a built-in XML parser to deal with those files.

Those functions and services are provided by MacOS because they need to be there.

And that's different from Windows and mshtml.dll how?

If I delete explorer.exe and it's assosiated DLLs.  Windows dies.
No, go ahead, delete iexplore.exe, and Windows will chug merrily on. Now, deleting explorer.exe would be much more obnoxious, but that's the shell.
DrPizza

Sun Apr 28 09:02:20 2002

Sure, it provides a number of services... that's great.  But the issue is that he said IE "cannot and should not" be removed from the system.  That is obviously forcing people to use IE whether they want to or not...

That's utter bullshit, and you know it.

Having IE installed does not require anyone to use it.  If you want to run Mozilla or Opera or Netscape or Lynx or whatever else, you're perfectly free to do so -- IE being installed has no bearing on this whatsoever.

If Gates said "the file system services provided by IE should not and cannot be removed from Window without serious harm to the system".  That's fine... that means you can keep some of the services that IE provides to Windows while not having to use IE as a web browser that competes directly with Netscape and others.

You can do that already.

This confuses me.  How is that destructive to the company?

Because it hurts their cash cow.

That's not a valid comparison at all.

(a) That doesn't answer the question
(b) Why not?  MS wants to ensure in order to use Office documents, one buys MS software -- Apple ensures that in order to use Apple OSes, one buys Apple hardware.  

A more accurate comparison would be if SJ said "Allowing Quicktime movies to be viewed on other peoples players is one of the most destructive...."
But of course, Quicktime is available for Windows...

And...?

Which other players let me play Quicktime movies?  QuickTime for Win32 doesn't cut it, it's from Apple.

Appleworks documents can be viewed in other apps, iMovie, FCP, DSP and other Apple apps all use some sort of industry standard format that can be easily used by competing products.

Products like iMovie and FCP are forced to use industry standard formats (like the DV format) because of the nature of the product.  I'm sure that if they didn't have to, they'd remain incapable of doing so, through either non-documentation or patenting of algorithms (much like certain QuickTime codecs...).


That whole browser/HTML engine thing is bogus too.

No, it isn't.

A Web browser does not inherently need to be installed on an Operating System.

Nor does a calculator, or an IP stack, or all manner of other things.  An operating system doesn't *need* to do anything more than boot the machine and provide some kind of programmatic interface.  If you're going to criticize MS for including anything above and beyond what an OS "inherently needs", you're not being particularly productive.  The world has moved on from what OSes "inherently need"; the last OS that came close to being that and that alone was probably something like DOS 3 (I think that predates its emm386 and himem and things like that).

None of these things are "inherently needed".  We accept this, and move on, because OSes that provide more than the bare essentials are far more pleasant for users.

I can delete Internet Explorer.app and every one of it's preference, library, and settings files and my system works fine.  If I delete explorer.exe and it's assosiated DLLs.  Windows dies.

Because Windows uses them.  If you want to delete the shells, that's fine -- but you can't delete the system services.  This is why people make the distinction.  It's not "bogus".  The system services do not require the shells, and you are free to ignore and/or delete them if you choose.  If you delete explorer.exe you'll have to replace it with some other shell (perhaps you'd prefer cmd.exe or something).  IE is just a shell around various system services.

That is a problem.

Er, why?  You can delete the shell, you can't delete the system services.  What's so problematic about that?  Can I just choose to delete OS X's system services without it complaining?

And it is obvious by this email that Gates *wanted* that to happen.

That is bad.  No two ways about it.


It isn't bad, it's beneficial to the developer and consumer alike.
Madan

Sun Apr 28 13:32:52 2002

It isn't bad, it's beneficial to the developer and consumer alike.


Bullshit.  The email talks about how Gates doesn't want the files to play at ALL, if possible.

That's good for the consumer....

..

.

if you're on mushrooms.

M.

Jeremy Reimer

Sun Apr 28 17:28:11 2002

Why is Microsoft supposed to care about what is "beneficial to the consumer"?  Microsoft only has to care about what it beneficial to Microsoft.  That's how capitalism works.

The only way to get Microsoft to behave in the best interest of everyone is to ensure that such behavior is also in the best interest of Microsoft.

DrPizza

Sun Apr 28 21:45:08 2002

Bullshit.  The email talks about how Gates doesn't want the files to play at ALL, if possible.

I was referring principally to the web browser issue.