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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? "
Several years back Be, Inc., developers of BeOS, launched a similar lawsuit against Microsoft. While it was touted as the case that would demolish Microsoft, I believe they ended up settling. So I wouldn't be surprised if we saw a repeat in this situation.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Do not suppress Go, do not collect one billion dollars.
Does Go feel they have a better case now that tablet PCs are using pens as a means for control?
In the 1980's pen recognition wasn't what most people would call viable so perhaps this "swift covert action to 'kill' the Go PenPoint wasn't as villanous than. However now, I'm sure there are a few judges that probably use a tablet with stylus and will see PenPoint as a possibly OS in a more favorable light.
-Teiresias
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.
Why would we assume that those two are mutually exclusive?
Is there any doubt that MS would have behaved that way, if they really perceived GO to be a threat?
Is there any doubt that they would have behaved immorally and illegally if that's what it took to counter that threat to their monopoly?
Was there any reason for Kaplan to file a suit before there was a possibility of success?
I'd say there's a good chance that Kaplan is taking advantage of MS's recent court losses to get his cut ... the cut that he's warranted because MS wrongly did him out of it!
See what I've been reading.
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.
3. Pay off gov't or company suing them.
4. Profit.
With all the dirt that's coming up as one antitrust suit cascades into another though, I start to wonder just how long Step 4 will remain viable for MS. Especially after the US$850 million settlement with IBM (which only settled some of the claims there, IIRC).
To paraphrase a famous quote from a US Congressman, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."
Karma's a bitch, and MS has bad karma by the cargo ship load to burn off.
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.
Even if the technology was not there in '94, Go was a company comitted to develop it. May or may not they would suceeded with it by let's say '96, if they had the chance. Instead, I think something like this happened:
1, Go starts do develop the technology.
2, Need money, so make publicity, attract investors.
3, MS smells competition, announces similar product
4, investors think: why should I invest in Go, when MS will soon have the same product (competing with MS never good!), which (according to MS) will be as good as or better, run on windows, thus instantly have all win application, integrated, etc, you know the MS drill about a new product.
5, Without money, Go folds.
6, MS suddenly realizes that the handwriting is not so hot.
7, The handwriting development stops for years, the world is set back in this field by about 5 years.
MS did something illegal? Will be hard to prove. But they were well avare that anything they say, people listen, and abused their position.
Szo
Red Leader Standing By!
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.
People, don't just RTFA, RTF book. If you read Jerry Kaplan's Start Up, you see that he was on the receiving end of Microsoft's illegal practices e.g. forcing OEMs to pay licenses even on machines that did not have Windows installed. Go was a real company, not some opportunistic "my business model is a lawsuit" bunch of asshats. For all the obvious reasons, challenging Microsoft in a court of law was hardly an option.
The fact that Microsoft shafted them in the early nineties and it's only now that Go is suing is irrelvant (not sure when Kaplan got the rights back from AT&T/Lucent to do so), the fact that pen computing did not take off back then, all these are irrelevant facts. MS broke the law to ruin other people's businesses. Now that they have been convicted of doing so, it's open season for a few years yet for anyone with strong evidence that they were a genuine victim.
StartUp is kind of a heart breaking read as a technologist. When Go is unable to get proper funding or business deals (here's where MS's business practice screws them, for instance), and the company dies even as part of AT&T, MS quietly shuts down its own pen computing division, apparently happy that another potential competitor has been crushed before it could be a problem. The idea is we're supposed to be able to try and get innovations tried by the marketplace, not blocked by people with the vested interest to do so.
If MS is found guily or settles out of court, then that would be entirely appropriate. Yes, there are so many complaints like this that it's a cliche. Doesn't mean there aren't genuine cases, and given there's a published book on the facts from 1995 - well before anyone knew MS could be successfully to court - I would say this is one of them.
A long time. At current levels, MS would need to settle a case like that once every 28 days before they start dipping into unprofitability. A $1,000,000,000 hit occasionally certainly hurts, but it's far from critical damage and is sustainable for some time yet.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
MS did something illegal? Will be hard to prove
Except for Gates telling Intel not to invest in Go. That just came out recently, and explains the timing and the viability of this suit.
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...
why? What is wrong with amazon? if you don't like them you can always grab the isbn number and go to your libraries system to reserve a copy, go to broders, go to barnes and noble or even a store owned locally. The world isn't owed a favor to any degree and your suggestion that it is owed is offensive.
I have several NCR 3125 NotePad computers that originally ran PenPoint OS.
These devices were what Microsoft now calls "Tablet PCs".
When they first came to market, Microsoft panicked and announced "Pen Extensions for Windows" (which added very little to Windows 3.1) and claimed that a buch of new systems were coming out to use it. Typical Microsoft vaporware tactics... everyone decided to wait for the wonderful new MS product instead of buying the PenPoint devices, and the market for them collapsed.
Considering that it took them this long to actually produce a product, they obviously only made the annoucement to kill any potential competitor from gaining a foothold.
Call it a conspiracy theory if you wish, but it's a court-proven tactic that MS loves to (ab)use and is quite famous for.
The handwriting recognition in PenPoint was actually very impressive, by the way.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
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.
I don't think Kaplan's complaints are without merrit... because it happened to us.
I worked at a company making "digital delivery" ware - stuff that allowed try-before-buy and key-based product unlocking from CD.
Microsoft approached us with interest in the product. However, we could never get them to sign an agreement where they would commit to deploying the technology. They wanted absolutely every detailed spec including code for evaluation, without committing... it suffices to say after a few months with no agreement, we told them we would not release the jewels without an agreement where a product resulted.
Within two weeks, Microsoft announced their own vapour competetive technology. Its FUD department was publishing slander against our product (their security experts saying DES was better than FEAL, lol). Microsoft was lobbying NTT against us as well as some of our clients. Some new clients bailed because they said "We'll wait for that microsoft solution."
Does this sound like fair trade practice?
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
My first thought is that MS didn't even qualify as a monopoly in 1994. This was when Windows 3.1 was out, and there were still a few different versions of DOS. MS was not the juggernaut it is now, no where near. Many PCs shipped with OSes other than MS. If MS wasn't a monopoly at the time (and I think it would be hard to say they were) there was nothing wrong with them asking Intel not to invest in Go. If it happened today, there would be no question of the legality (as in none). But assuming it was malicious and illegal then based on MS now is just wrong.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"