Thu Apr 25 11:37:50 2002
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.
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..
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,
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?
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.
Thu Apr 25 16:12:00 2002
hmmmm.
Thu Apr 25 18:37:52 2002
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.
Thu Apr 25 19:18:15 2002
Thu Apr 25 19:28:22 2002
????
Browser == Netscape or Mozilla
HTML engine == Mosaic/zilla engine.
How exactly does that explain what went down in those emails?
M.
Thu Apr 25 22:22:27 2002
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.
Thu Apr 25 22:42:19 2002
If I delete explorer.exe and it's assosiated DLLs. Windows dies.
(Edited by HitScan at 7:48 am on April 26, 2002)
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.
Fri Apr 26 02:22:48 2002
from chrisale posted at 5:22 pm on April 25, 2002And that's different from Windows and mshtml.dll how?
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.
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.
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...
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.
This confuses me. How is that destructive to the company?
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...
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.
That whole browser/HTML engine thing is bogus too.
A Web browser does not inherently need to be installed on an Operating System.
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.
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.
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.
Sun Apr 28 17:28:11 2002
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.
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.