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

Interesting stuff...

[a_karbon_devel_005]

The agreement even states that Apple will encourage its employees to use Microsoft Internet Explorer for Macintosh for all Apple-sponsored events and will not promote another browser to its employees. I had no idea Apple had agreements like this.

Re:Interesting stuff...

[a_karbon_devel_005]

Actually, according to the transcript, the reason for the agreement to promote IE was not "symbiotic" or even stock-driven. Microsoft basically threatened to stop making Office for Mac unless Mac agreed to promote IE over Netscape.

Re:Woo

[jellomizer]

I am guessing you havn't done much Microsoft Development. Did you ever wonder why MS Has features in their programs that you cannot program easily using Microsofts tools. When Office allows the fade in with graphics and colors menus in all their product while your API only allowed the text only popup Menus. MS Does do this. It is not about MS bashing it is about MS not giving us the tools to create modern applications.

Undocumented APIs

[Oddscurity]

Ultimately this will/has hurt Windows, as those programs targetting the undocumented APIs -where some MS apps get their features from- will require that hidden API to remain relatively static. And when problems are found in this undocumented API, either you leave the problem in place and work around it (and thereby leave the existing software using it potentially vulnerable), or you have to push an update for all those programs.

Maybe this is part of the reason why Linux's kernel has no fixed ABI?

Re:Undocumented APIs

[Lord_Slepnir]

yeah, and as a kernel developer, I get sick of having to re-write parts of my modules every 2-3 maintainence releases (For example, how the way to do parameters was changed). And don't get me started on EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL (Bite me, Stallman). Maybe a stable (and available to us that don't work in GPL hippie-ville) API is needed, at least within the same minor release. I'm fine with having to change thing when I upgrade from 2.4.28 to 2.6.6, but not from 2.6.8 to 2.6.10.

Re:Undocumented APIs

[Oddscurity]

Cue depends.exe to do just that, indeed. Some relatively well-known examples of using undocumented APIs are by Sysinternals, who were recently acquired by Microsoft:

Fundelete accomplishes this through the use of an undocumented API, ObOpenObjectByPointer
...
The final step Fundelete performs is to convert the binary representation of the SID into a textual representation. Another undocumented API, RtlConvertSidToUnicodeString, performs this.
...
Tokenmon relies on several undocumented SRM functions to obtain a logon ID from a thread's primary and impersonation tokens, and GetSecurityUserInfo, an undocumented function exported by the KSecDD (Kernel Security-support driver) that retrieves a logon session user's name, domain name, and logon server given a logon ID. Another interesting implementation detail is that several of the native API functions that Tokenmon hooks are not exported by ntoskrnl.exe for use by drivers. Thus, the Tokenmon GUI must reach into NTDLL.DLL, extract their system call numbers, and pass them to the driver.

This courtesy of the people who unearthed the Sony Rootkit, which goes to show it takes someone with knowledge of deeply intertwingled cruft to find it?

But more importantly: if ISVs behave in this way with limited knowledge of undocumented functions, how do you think Microsoft uses them?

Re:Woo

[Blakey Rat]

That's a dumb question. Office menus look the way they do because they're written from scratch to look that way. Hundreds of applications for every OS ever made do this, that doesn't mean that there's some huge conspiracy, just that the Office team spent more time getting their menus right than you did and enough time to QA is so that people like you would be tricked into thinking it's some hidden part of the OS. How paranoid are you? Programming menus isn't some "magic operation" that can only be performed by the OS, any decent programmer can make their own pull-down menu implementation. I'm sure Photoshop and other applications of Office's size do the same.

Now asking *why* Office does this, that might be a valid question. But implying that it's some kind of conspiracy is stupid.

Hell, Apple used to provide basically a plug-in architecture for drawing menus, windows and buttons since they knew overriding the default appearance and behavior would be popular. It was a code resource in Mac OS Classic and if you had one in there, Mac OS would automatically load your code whenever it needed to handle a click on menus. (Obviously a bad idea from a security standpoint... it was disabled long ago.)

And this is relivant because ______

[Lord_Slepnir]

Alright, I'm not a lawyer. I don't even play one on slashdot. But can someone please tell me how one Microsoft rep referring to developers as a cheap date is in any way shape or form relevant in an anti-trust case.

Also, does anyone else get an image of the robot preacher from Futurerama when they hear the words "Tech Evangelist"?