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Founder of Go Computer, Inc. sues Microsoft
wantobe writes "From Yahoo! News 'Microsoft saw Go's PC operating system as a serious threat to its operating system monopoly and took swift covert action to 'kill' it just as it did the Netscape/Sun Java threat to its monopoly," according to Go's private action in federal court. '
Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut? "
Gee, you're really breaking my heart.
Sniff.
Poor liddle Microsoft. Why won't all these 'kooks' just leave them alone! Leave them alone to carry out their long time company policy of IP theft and sleaze.
The story is well described in his book, Startup : A Silicon Valley Adventure. He has some point.
If you had RTFA, you would see that this case has nothing to do with IP. Letters surfaced in a different lawsuit which proves beyond a doubt that Bill Gates himself asked Andy Grove not to invest in Go, and that Bill viewed any investment in Go as "Anti-Microsoft", in Billy's own words. Sounds pretty anti-competitive and collusive to me.
Get Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside and learn some history. Written by a former MS employee it has some stuff about what happened back then around Go and Microsoft.
I did RTFA... I've also read this separate blurb on the lawsuit yesterday that had information on a portion of the case that delt with the information the engineers had been privy to during the NDA period. That's what I was referring to.
Could you at least read the very first paragraph of TFA?
"The founder of Go Computer, a pioneer of pen-based computing that was once seen as a possible alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems, filed antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft last week"
Au contraire, it is officially ("Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999 that Microsoft's dominance of the personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly.").
Kaplan is hardly a kook. He is claiming that new information has come out in the recent antitrust trials, in particular, that Gates pushed Intel into dropping plans to invest in Go.
``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. . . I'm asking you not to make any investment in Go Corporation,''
In his book, Startup, Kaplan describes how they shared trade secrets with Microsoft, something they were not keen on doing, but Microsoft promised to set a "Chinese wall" between their app division and the OS division, so only the applications people would know and that they'd be able to produce software in support of Go. In this excerpt from Startup, Kaplan details how Microsoft's app division made us of confidential information Go had shared with them to create Pen Windows, which, even as vapourware, effectively killed Go.
They settled for about 23 million dollars. Read about it here.
Free Scotland!
People don't remember that there was a reason Microsoft won. They actually had a better product.
Where "better" is (as you note) defined as "more compatible with Microsoft's existing product". Where the competition was compatible, Microsoft changed their software to make it incompatible (this is not simply speculation, it's well documented by MS employees and in MS memos). Microsoft really DID have that kind of power to cripple a competing product back in 1987 (or the early '90s: Windows wasn't really usable until Windows 3.11 and the 386 came together).
But the key thing that you're missing is that the fact that "better" means "more compatible with DOS" means that Microsoft was starting the race at the finish line.
Pretty damning stuff.
No matter how many times the evidence gets posted, there are still people who seem ignorant of Microsoft's criminal behaviour. Of course, we also know that Microsoft has been caught paying people to write articles and post in forums, so we never know what a given poster's motivation is.
Cases like Go's lawsuit are _NOT_ frivilous attempts to get money out of Microsoft. On the contrary, Microsoft has had a series of losses in court BECAUSE MICROSOFT WAS GUILTY.
In just the last few years, Microsoft was found guilty of criminal behaviour by the DOJ, and has had to make massive payouts to Sun, Novell, IBM, Apple, and others. Those are not companies that got rich through frivilous lawsuits.
Microsoft's standard method of operation has been well documented over the years. As happened with DR-DOS, Java, and Netscape, among other examples, Microsoft:
1. Allows their own product to stagnate for years.
2. Finally notices when another company starts to succeed with a new or improved technology.
3. Copies the new or improved technology (sometimes buys it, but often steals it, hence the lawsuits).
4. Fails to succeed with their often-second-rate copy.
5. Finally resorts to sabotaging the other company, through FUD, payoffs, polluting standards, and so on.
6. Gets a slap on the wrist from the courts. Pays a fine. Profit!
Microsoft's greatest innovation is their strategy for stealing technology. Microsoft always starts out by forming a partnership, or at least entering into negotiations with the other company, before stealing that company's technology. That way, the criminal courts never get involved, and no one at Microsoft ends up going to jail. Instead, the case always goes to civil court, where the worst Microsoft is likely to face is a fine. Microsoft is a master at manipulating the law.
I said that the evidence is frequently posted. Here is where you can read some of it:
The DOJ case against Microsoft - Findings of Fact:
For example, this quote showing how Microsoft blackmailed Apple:
> Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."
Or these quotes from Microsoft's James Allchin:
> I don't understand how IE is going to win. The current path is simply to copy everything that Netscape does packaging and product wise. Let's [suppose] IE is as good as Navigator/Communicator. Who wins? The one with 80% market share.
> Pitting browser against browser is hard since Netscape has 80% marketshare and we have 20%.... I am convinced we have to use Windows -- this is the one thing they don't have.... We have to be competitive with features, but we need something more -- Windows integration. If you agree that Windows is a huge asset, then it follows quickly that we are not investing sufficiently in finding ways to tie IE and Windows together.
Also, read the parts about the ways Microsoft "encouraged" companies to break their contracts with Netscape, about how Microsoft threatened Intel to get them to stop working on Java, and so on.
Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft over Java:
This is a classic case of Microsoft attempting to copy/steal another company's product, then sabotaging that company's version of it.
For example, there is this memo about a meeting with Bill Gates:
> When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues/concerns...
I was there, I was a witness to what happened back in the 90s when this all happened, and Microsoft really did to Go what Kaplan says they did. I worked for Slate, a pen-based apps startup in the same building in Foster City that Go was in. I used the Go OS, which was powerful, well-designed, feature-rich and ran acceptably on a 386-based touchscreen tablet - a real advance at that time. Microsoft's Pen Windows, which I also used on a personal machine, was inferior in comparison. Go was way ahead technologically. Microsoft suckered Go into telling secrets under NDA, and once they had the details, MS's marketing guys played the vaporware game on Go in the public arena. A key clue was that after Go fell, MS pen computing vanished for almost a decade. It had all been about control of the market, not innovation. Hell yes, Kaplan is justified in suing. It really happened as he says.
They requested to look at Go's code so that Windows could 'support it better'. After that, they announced a vaporware version of Go, and as soon as Go was out of business dropped their own pen product.
So they clearly used their OS monopoly (you needed your pen to work on windows) to feed their application group code to make at least a rough version of the same product. Definitely abusing their os monopoly to further extend their application monopoly. Those are the facts of the case I'm interested, not a message from Bill Gates, but the actions of many separate divisions in MS consipiring against a potential competitor.
The only thing that came along that was better was OS/2, and IBM made the fatal mistake of making it incompatible with Win32 and Windows drivers (which meant no software).
BS. MS made a point of breaking compatibility with OS/2 with successive releases of WIN32S.DLL, until they finally added a new call to allocate memory...that always allocated memory outside the 512 megabyte range that OS/2 DOS sessions permitted. The 512 megabyte limit was a sufficiently basic design decision that IBM gave up (though the limitation was gotten rid of late in Warp 4, long after it mattered). If you want RAM, does it matter to an application where it is? No. The sole purpose of the call was to make it extremely difficult to maintain compatibility.
Go made two big mistakes. One was negotiating with Microsoft, and the other was partnering with AT&T. Back then, AT&T was trying to figure out what to do after deregulation. There was an AT&T PC (running UNIX, no less), AT&T minicomputers (running on 48VDC, just like telco gear), and for a brief period, AT&T retail computer stores. AT&T insisted that Go port their system over to some wierd AT&T CPU, which they did. Then they had some designer firm design a cool-looking but inconvenient case for the thing, with plastic plug-on modules on the side.
The prototype was better than the "production version".
...at least AFAIK. I read Jerry Kaplan's book and in there the company is called "Go Corporation," or "Go Corp" for short... NEVER is it called "Go Computer."
Search for either of those names or for "PenPoint" (the name of their first tablet and its OS) returns quite a few pages.
~Philly
A1. OS/2 supported the same Win32s that Windows 3.1's win32s package supported.
"Better" means in a faster, more stable, and more efficent manner - all of which OS/2 did. As for OS/2 being "more resource intensive" - it actually _used_ the 386 with pre-emptive multi-tasking - unlike windows, in which the entire computer was at the mercy of the currently running program to suspend itself.
C. You apparently didn't even bother a cursory google for the information. You are competely wrong, sorry. Digital Research even had a succesfull lawsuit against Microsoft for the intentional, anti-competitive flaws added to windows.
feh. stuff.
In the case of business, it's a matter of law, so it's not my definition, but that of the United States.
As to your sports metaphor, look to wrestling and boxing. The reason they have weight classes is because a 110# boxer would get beaten to a pulp by a 220# boxer, no matter how good he was. They are required to compete separately.
Well your first thought was wrong. The DOJ first started investigating MS about their monopoly in the PC operating system market in 1991. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_antitrust_c ase as an example. Or just google Microsoft antitrust 1994. The first consent agreement was signed in 1994 with MS agreeing not to force manufactorers to include other MS products with Windows. This was the agreement that the later antitrust trial was about, MS tieing IE in with Windows.
Remember back then how hard it was to buy a computer without a MS operating system? How manufactorers had to pay the MS tax even if they did include a non MS OS?
Don't know why you were modded up so high unless it is because a lot of people here are to young to remember how hard it was to aquire a computer without DOS or Windows back then.
MS has had a monopoly on PC OSes since damn near the beginning. I've even heard that MS set the price on the other available OSes back then. $50 for MS-DOS, $500 for CPM86 or USCD Pascal. Don't know whether it is true though.
I do know that IBM went way over board in making sure that they were not breaking their consent agreement with the DOJ and gave MS way to much control.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism