Developers As Pawns and One-Night Stands

jcatcw writes "At the Comes vs. Microsoft antitrust case, last Friday's testimony included evidence that James Plamondon, a Microsoft technical evangelist, in a 1996 speech referred to independent software developers as 'pawns' and compared wooing them to trying to win over a one-night stand. Last week's proceedings also included testimony by Ronald Alepin, a former CTO at Fujitsu Software Corp. and currently an adviser to the law firm Morrison Foerster LLP. He said that Lotus 1-2-3 was killed, in part, by Microsoft encouraging Lotus's programmers to use the Windows API even though Microsoft's own developers found it too complicated to use." The plaintiffs have created a site that includes transcripts of testimony presented in the case.

Comments

Re:Stupid-ass Question

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed his point, and got caught by the simple, common example.

Microsoft actually had two layers of API. There was an internal API used by other Microsoft employees, and the public API advertised and documented for other devleopers to use.

There were several articles in Dr. Dobb's Journal detailing diferences between the APIs, written by people who were trying to tear under the hood in ways Microsoft STILL describes as criminal.

Some of the public API structures did nothing but rearrange the arguments, call a delay timer, and then call the internal API. Seriously.

The material described in these articles was part of the first big push about Microsoft abusing it's monopoly position. After all, people were builidng proof that Micorsoft was specifically making it impossible for anyone to write applications that could finction as cleanly, quickly, smoothly as Microsoft's own, or that could even be as small as Microsoft's own. They used the natural OS monopoly to make it impossible to compete fairly in the application market for that OS.

I wonder why Microsoft calls the efforts to uncover the API differences criminal?

And for those who want to call this blatant Microsoft bashing, go check Dr. Dobb's Journals from the early Windows 3.1 era for yourself. I don't have to make this up. The facts do more bashing than anything I could make up.

Re:Woo

[CockMonster]

Rubbish, check out owner-drawn menus in the MSDN documentation. THere's nothing to prevent you from doing kind of thing yourself. I've done it.

Re:Stupid-ass Question

[vdboor]

If you're writing an app for Windows, what is the alternative to using the Windows API? How could Microsoft develop Windows applications without using the Windows API? Well consider reading about Windows NT, Secret APIs and the Consequences (Google Cache). There is a private hidden API under the Win32 API calls. For example, NtCreateProcess is the internal function used by the CreateProcess function. The Win32 API only exposes a small subset of the available API functions in Windows. From the article:

(..) when Microsoft released Internet Information Server (IIS), it significantly outperformed Netscape Server on the NT Platform. Microsoft insisted that its developers had not had any additional acceess to information than had Netscape developers. Yet after careful review, Netscape developers were able to utilize previously undisclosed information about NT in their own products. Future releases of Netscape Server were competitive with IIS in subsequent testing. If you write programs using a documented API, the programs run slower. The second quote illustrates that Microsoft uses the hidden APIs to make their applications the best in any particular market:

Microsoft can write application code that can run optimally on an operating system, has advance knowledge about future releases, knows which programming method to choose over another, and can tweak the OS code prior to final relase to advantage3 its own applications. If you perform the costly task of reverse-engineering the hidden APIs in order to compete with Microsoft, they change those hidden APIs to favor their products.

If the product becomes popular or makes money, Microsoft can make a faster competing product using the real system calls, or they can change the real NT system calls out from under your product at the next release of NT. In either case, Microsoft can cause their competing product to inherit your market.