From a quick Google search, the only real references called the under the table payment "substantial". The actual figure was blacked out on the trial Finding of Fact document. I did find the $300M figure in a old Slashdot post, but take that for what it's worth.
You're right that Microsoft was more interested in the apps market than the OS market. The question is whether they wanted Apple to licence by themselves, or whether MS wanted their piece too.
Apple was quiet about it, but news reports of the time indicated that a large chunk of QuickTime code ended up in Video For Windows via a small third party contract house.
It was (apparently) a clear case of copyright infringement, not patents. Apple also apparently had a judge willing to issue an injunction against Microsoft shipping certain products if the settlement talks fell through. One of those products could have been Windows 95.
Apple was hush-hush about it because they wanted to settle and get Office and IE. Part of the complications was they also wanted to get Microsoft to commit to Copeland (and later OSX), and Microsoft wanted certain things too.
The notion that Apple was going to go out of business with Microsoft's help is bullshit. They still had money in the bank, and Microsoft had nothing to do with fixing their fucked-up product strategy and production problems. Former CEO Spindler covers much of this stuff in his book, but old San Jose paper reports were also interesting.
Faith? Don't forget that Apple had Microsoft over the barrel over clear cut case of code stealing. The only question is what the settlement would be, but everyone knew that it would include a new version of MS Office.
So, Apple got $300 Million under the table, $100 Million over the table and commitments for good versions of Office and IE. The only thing Apple gave away was putting IE as the default browser, but considering MacNetscape's suck, that was a no brainer.
Most Mac users are very loyal to MS Office, so absent political concerns, Microsoft would ship new versions anyway. What really turned Apple around was new CPUs and cutting the model line up from a confusing mix of 20 odd machines + 1000 clones to a simple matrix of four boxes.
I'd bet that Apple's 68K Emulator was used heavily in Star Trek. MacOS is laden with non-portable 68K assembly and pascal code. In the early days of the PPC switch, 90% of the OS was running in emulation, including such critical bits as the SCSI and Networking subsystems. Even today, they haven't shipped a 100% native OS, and won't until OSX.
If you thought System 7.1.2 on a Performa 6100 was slow, now imagine it on the average low rent 486SX-33 of the day. Ow.
Of course, doing a FAT-style transition to x86 would have been possible, but from a marketing standpoint it would be stupid. "Port to Intel", "Port to PPC", "Support the 68K installed base". Most software companies would probably have done nothing, and Apple would have been forced to make 060 machines.
Like the other guy said, you pretty much nailed it.
Perhaps saying that Windows 9x is a "modern application" is overstating the case... But one thing is for sure -- Microsoft is an Application company, not an Operating System company, and that attitude is pervasive when you look at how they've handled 9x and NT.
The whole point of "Windows" in the beginning was simply to provide a common platform for which Microsoft could develop it's own software, overcome the "WordPerfect Printer Driver" problem, and to do so as quickly and cheaply as possible on the maximum number of boxes out there. The fact that it had a sorta documented API was merely a concession to the fact that most 3rd party programs on Windows complement Microsoft's, not compete with them.
It seems obvious now that Microsoft came upon this strategy very early on, back in the OS/2 era, even before NT shipped. They determined that a hacked up OS would give them wider penetration for their applications than a "real" OS, and have been running with that ball ever since. NT "Workstation" has almost never been marketed, except to potential Unix converts, and there Microsoft was certainly eyeing the server machines. (And to that end, you wonder why, because the only server apps that Microsoft has taken remotely seriously has been SQL Server and recently IIS. Perhaps it's just the PR illusion that you could potentially be a 100% Microsoft shop somehow sells Office licences.)
I'm a little slower on the uptake than you, so perhaps I didn't figure this out until Microsoft shelved PnP and APM for NT 4.0 and left it on the shelf for 4 long years. Anyway, I expect that their current "Win2000 is the future, WinME is the last" attitude to last exactly long enough until the find a sweeter app platform than 9x/ME. If the market buys their new.NETwork Computer approach, except Windows to sink into irrelevance even before the government successfully breaks that part off.
TW is big, but they are also grotesquely inefficient. They've never done a good job of coordinating enough that they make any real money off of all their properties, and somehow I suspect that other than the general stupidifcation of entertainment, they've never been able to coordinate any message across their product lines. Remember what they did to Atari (millions of new "E.T." cartridges buried in some landfill).
If they had shown real profits for all those properties, AOL never could have afforded them in the first place. Somehow I doubt that AOL's dopey ad-driven service is somehow going to be able to tie all that crap together enough to efficently shove it down anyone's throat.
The early Apple designers were aware of the wide area systems that were in place, such as the ARPANet, the question was how to develop applications on top of it. They even had the concept of POPs and ISPs down (calling them "A Nodes").
Where the disconnect happened was later on, when Apple's managers chose to build a proprietary network system and actively discourage connections to other systems. Wired 5.11 had a big expose of how Apple basically told corporate MIS to go to hell when people were requesting hetrogenius networking for the Mac:
Just as he had dismissed the importance of licensing, Gassée never saw the need for Apple's computers to communicate with anything except other Apple computers.... This was a terrible strategy, of course, because it did not seamlessly link Macintoshes with IBM-compatibles. "We looked at Gassée and said, 'Who is this guy?'"
...
Jean-Louis Gassée had won nearly every fight. He was the undisputed master of engineering, the person who had almost always gotten his way. Now he would put another indelible stamp on Apple, one that would have repercussions as grave as the decision not to license.
By "not marketed correctly" do you mean to say that charging $700 for a video game box was pretty foolish? The "multipurpose" stuff was mainly for wall street -- 3DO was sold as a game machine.
If anyone can ship interactive TV for $200 + $20/month, there might be a market for this sort of thing. You do need the obvious applications (games, internet).
A long time ago, a friend and I would try to play stupid tricks on the post office. Things like sending letters with the name and city only, mailing rocks postage due and then rejecting them on reciept and so on.
One thing that didn't work was sending an open letter. The post office taped it up and stamped "SEALED FOR YOUR PRIVACY" all over it about 15 times.
The only reason Apple machines have CPU upgrades rather than motherboard upgrades is because Apple won't licence out their motherboard chipset and are continually using custom form factors.
Nobody (except you apparently) thinks CPU upgrades are an optimal solution. Furthermore, if you'd looked at any PC parts catalog, you'd find that you can get CPU upgrades for 90% of the PCs made in the last 10 years, but new motherboards are so cheap that most people don't choose this option.
Right, and Compaq wrote their own BIOS because blah blah blah. Doesn't explain why they still do it 18 years later when every random boxshop just pays a nominal fee to Phoenix.
When somebody thinks they are smart by telling you about PC clones is where the sighs starts on my end.
Why is using a disk-based config program "proprietary" and why does hinder Unix installs? The reason that Compaq does it that way is to make the configuration OS-independent because they've always supported things like SCO UNIX (although there's a copy of Windows 95 in that system partition).
My suspicion is that the reason that Compaq, Dell, and IBM write their own BIOSes is that they feel that the generic Phoenix sorts aren't very good. Since there really isn't a PC BIOS spec to speak of, of course there will be small proprietary differences and different bugs.
The way I read what he said was that the lack of affordable Unix systems, combined with Microsoft's shittiness, lead to Linux starting Linux. Here's a quote from Linus which seems to explain it:
It kind of evolved through luck and happenstance into an OS, simply because there was very much a void where there wasn't much choice for someone like me. I couldn't afford some of the commercial OSes and I didn't want to run DOS or Windows -- I don't even know, did Windows really exist then?source
The same page talks about how delays to BSD gave Linux early momentum. I think you could throw in there Microsoft's and IBM's inablility to ship a consumer 386-based OS in the late 80s as something that generally ticked PC users off. And UNIX solutions (from say SCO) were ungodly expensive for an individual.
I think it's fair to say that if someone was selling a 386-based UNIX for $100 in 1990, Linus at least wouldn't have invented Linux. FreeBSD would still be around though.
That would explain why MS puts resources into maintaining a nitch product like Host Integration Server (formerly SNA Server).
I've heard VMS guys pointing out that Microsoft also runs several VMS/Alpha and VMS/VAX back office systems. Many of these systems are OLD, of course. During the anti-trust trial, it came out that Windows sales were tracked on pieces of paper in someone's desk, so it sounds like their systems are f*ed-up to the extent you'd expect from a Windows+Legacy shop.
W2K runs as fast as NT4+Active Desktop on my P-133/112MB/SCSI-2 system. Have you been smoking the Intel crack to the point that you think a desktop OS is CPU-bound, rather than memory/swap bound?
IIRC, that was before Sony owned any movie studios.
Re:License wars are a waste of energy
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
You don't think that TrollTech makes money off of internal corporate developers? Until recent annoucements for Borland and other commercial products using Qt, that's the only place they've ever made any money.
If you can name any pre-Linux craze commercial applications that use Qt, let me know, because I don't know of any.
Since you seem to be a Novell fan, remind yourself that Novell 4.0 sales were also abysmal for the first year or two.
It took at least a year before the installed base started to comprehend the trials, troubles, benefits and bugetary implications of a directory system. Factor in the relative intelligance of NT and Novell admins.
NDS eventually took off to a degree, so 6 months of sales data isn't enough to say one way or another for W2K Server. Like Novell 3, NT4 might stay on the product list longer than expected, tho.
Late post, but this is right from the W2KS help file:
Several things happen when you change to native mode:
Domain controllers no longer support NTLM replication.
The domain controller that is emulating the PDC operations master can not synchronize data with a Windows NT BDC.
Windows NT domain controllers can not be added to the domain. (You can of course add new Windows 2000 domain controllers.)
Users and computers using previous versions of Windows begin to benefit from the transitive trusts of Active Directory and (with the proper authorization) can access resources anywhere in the forest. Although previous versions of Windows do not support the Kerberos V5 protocol, the pass-through authentication provided by the domain controllers allows users and computers to be authenticated in any domain in the forest. This enables users or computers to access resources in any domain in the forest for which they have the appropriate permissions.
Other than the enhanced access to any other domains in the forest, clients will not be aware of any changes in the domain.
Note that the only implication is that you can't use NT4-style domain controllers in your domain. That means Samba should still work fine as long as the DCs are Windows 2000.
Re:License wars are a waste of energy
on
KDE Strikes Back
·
· Score: 1
If QT were GPLed, you could write internal corporate applications with QT without paying TrollTech, as long as you never distributed them outside of your company. That would seriously undercut Troll's revenue stream.
Slashdot Mirror
Corrected on the "over the table" amount.
From a quick Google search, the only real references called the under the table payment "substantial". The actual figure was blacked out on the trial Finding of Fact document. I did find the $300M figure in a old Slashdot post, but take that for what it's worth.
You're right that Microsoft was more interested in the apps market than the OS market. The question is whether they wanted Apple to licence by themselves, or whether MS wanted their piece too.
Apple was quiet about it, but news reports of the time indicated that a large chunk of QuickTime code ended up in Video For Windows via a small third party contract house.
It was (apparently) a clear case of copyright infringement, not patents. Apple also apparently had a judge willing to issue an injunction against Microsoft shipping certain products if the settlement talks fell through. One of those products could have been Windows 95.
Apple was hush-hush about it because they wanted to settle and get Office and IE. Part of the complications was they also wanted to get Microsoft to commit to Copeland (and later OSX), and Microsoft wanted certain things too.
The notion that Apple was going to go out of business with Microsoft's help is bullshit. They still had money in the bank, and Microsoft had nothing to do with fixing their fucked-up product strategy and production problems. Former CEO Spindler covers much of this stuff in his book, but old San Jose paper reports were also interesting.
Sort of an ambiguous question.
Not when you consider that the real meaning of "Ask Slashdot" is actually "Troll Slashdot".
Faith? Don't forget that Apple had Microsoft over the barrel over clear cut case of code stealing. The only question is what the settlement would be, but everyone knew that it would include a new version of MS Office.
So, Apple got $300 Million under the table, $100 Million over the table and commitments for good versions of Office and IE. The only thing Apple gave away was putting IE as the default browser, but considering MacNetscape's suck, that was a no brainer.
Most Mac users are very loyal to MS Office, so absent political concerns, Microsoft would ship new versions anyway. What really turned Apple around was new CPUs and cutting the model line up from a confusing mix of 20 odd machines + 1000 clones to a simple matrix of four boxes.
Bill was just mad that Apple shot him down when he tried to licence the MacOS some years before.
I'd bet that Apple's 68K Emulator was used heavily in Star Trek. MacOS is laden with non-portable 68K assembly and pascal code. In the early days of the PPC switch, 90% of the OS was running in emulation, including such critical bits as the SCSI and Networking subsystems. Even today, they haven't shipped a 100% native OS, and won't until OSX.
If you thought System 7.1.2 on a Performa 6100 was slow, now imagine it on the average low rent 486SX-33 of the day. Ow.
Of course, doing a FAT-style transition to x86 would have been possible, but from a marketing standpoint it would be stupid. "Port to Intel", "Port to PPC", "Support the 68K installed base". Most software companies would probably have done nothing, and Apple would have been forced to make 060 machines.
Like the other guy said, you pretty much nailed it.
... But one thing is for sure -- Microsoft is an Application company, not an Operating System company, and that attitude is pervasive when you look at how they've handled 9x and NT.
.NETwork Computer approach, except Windows to sink into irrelevance even before the government successfully breaks that part off.
Perhaps saying that Windows 9x is a "modern application" is overstating the case
The whole point of "Windows" in the beginning was simply to provide a common platform for which Microsoft could develop it's own software, overcome the "WordPerfect Printer Driver" problem, and to do so as quickly and cheaply as possible on the maximum number of boxes out there. The fact that it had a sorta documented API was merely a concession to the fact that most 3rd party programs on Windows complement Microsoft's, not compete with them.
It seems obvious now that Microsoft came upon this strategy very early on, back in the OS/2 era, even before NT shipped. They determined that a hacked up OS would give them wider penetration for their applications than a "real" OS, and have been running with that ball ever since. NT "Workstation" has almost never been marketed, except to potential Unix converts, and there Microsoft was certainly eyeing the server machines. (And to that end, you wonder why, because the only server apps that Microsoft has taken remotely seriously has been SQL Server and recently IIS. Perhaps it's just the PR illusion that you could potentially be a 100% Microsoft shop somehow sells Office licences.)
I'm a little slower on the uptake than you, so perhaps I didn't figure this out until Microsoft shelved PnP and APM for NT 4.0 and left it on the shelf for 4 long years. Anyway, I expect that their current "Win2000 is the future, WinME is the last" attitude to last exactly long enough until the find a sweeter app platform than 9x/ME. If the market buys their new
right.
TW is big, but they are also grotesquely inefficient. They've never done a good job of coordinating enough that they make any real money off of all their properties, and somehow I suspect that other than the general stupidifcation of entertainment, they've never been able to coordinate any message across their product lines. Remember what they did to Atari (millions of new "E.T." cartridges buried in some landfill).
If they had shown real profits for all those properties, AOL never could have afforded them in the first place. Somehow I doubt that AOL's dopey ad-driven service is somehow going to be able to tie all that crap together enough to efficently shove it down anyone's throat.
The early Apple designers were aware of the wide area systems that were in place, such as the ARPANet, the question was how to develop applications on top of it. They even had the concept of POPs and ISPs down (calling them "A Nodes").
... This was a terrible strategy, of course, because it did not seamlessly link Macintoshes with IBM-compatibles. "We looked at Gassée and said, 'Who is this guy?'"
Where the disconnect happened was later on, when Apple's managers chose to build a proprietary network system and actively discourage connections to other systems. Wired 5.11 had a big expose of how Apple basically told corporate MIS to go to hell when people were requesting hetrogenius networking for the Mac:
Just as he had dismissed the importance of licensing, Gassée never saw the need for Apple's computers to communicate with anything except other Apple computers.
...
Jean-Louis Gassée had won nearly every fight. He was the undisputed master of engineering, the person who had almost always gotten his way. Now he would put another indelible stamp on Apple, one that would have repercussions as grave as the decision not to license.
By "not marketed correctly" do you mean to say that charging $700 for a video game box was pretty foolish? The "multipurpose" stuff was mainly for wall street -- 3DO was sold as a game machine.
If anyone can ship interactive TV for $200 + $20/month, there might be a market for this sort of thing. You do need the obvious applications (games, internet).
A long time ago, a friend and I would try to play stupid tricks on the post office. Things like sending letters with the name and city only, mailing rocks postage due and then rejecting them on reciept and so on.
One thing that didn't work was sending an open letter. The post office taped it up and stamped "SEALED FOR YOUR PRIVACY" all over it about 15 times.
The only reason Apple machines have CPU upgrades rather than motherboard upgrades is because Apple won't licence out their motherboard chipset and are continually using custom form factors.
Nobody (except you apparently) thinks CPU upgrades are an optimal solution. Furthermore, if you'd looked at any PC parts catalog, you'd find that you can get CPU upgrades for 90% of the PCs made in the last 10 years, but new motherboards are so cheap that most people don't choose this option.
Right, and Compaq wrote their own BIOS because blah blah blah. Doesn't explain why they still do it 18 years later when every random boxshop just pays a nominal fee to Phoenix.
When somebody thinks they are smart by telling you about PC clones is where the sighs starts on my end.
Why is using a disk-based config program "proprietary" and why does hinder Unix installs? The reason that Compaq does it that way is to make the configuration OS-independent because they've always supported things like SCO UNIX (although there's a copy of Windows 95 in that system partition).
My suspicion is that the reason that Compaq, Dell, and IBM write their own BIOSes is that they feel that the generic Phoenix sorts aren't very good. Since there really isn't a PC BIOS spec to speak of, of course there will be small proprietary differences and different bugs.
The way I read what he said was that the lack of affordable Unix systems, combined with Microsoft's shittiness, lead to Linux starting Linux. Here's a quote from Linus which seems to explain it:
It kind of evolved through luck and happenstance into an OS, simply because there was very much a void where there wasn't much choice for someone like me. I couldn't afford some of the commercial OSes and I didn't want to run DOS or Windows -- I don't even know, did Windows really exist then? source
The same page talks about how delays to BSD gave Linux early momentum. I think you could throw in there Microsoft's and IBM's inablility to ship a consumer 386-based OS in the late 80s as something that generally ticked PC users off. And UNIX solutions (from say SCO) were ungodly expensive for an individual.
I think it's fair to say that if someone was selling a 386-based UNIX for $100 in 1990, Linus at least wouldn't have invented Linux. FreeBSD would still be around though.
That would explain why MS puts resources into maintaining a nitch product like Host Integration Server (formerly SNA Server).
I've heard VMS guys pointing out that Microsoft also runs several VMS/Alpha and VMS/VAX back office systems. Many of these systems are OLD, of course. During the anti-trust trial, it came out that Windows sales were tracked on pieces of paper in someone's desk, so it sounds like their systems are f*ed-up to the extent you'd expect from a Windows+Legacy shop.
I have heard the term FUD defined on Usenet as "Flaming User Demand" (through vaporware announcements).
It's either an alternate meaning or an incorrect definition that at least one other person has heard.
W2K runs as fast as NT4+Active Desktop on my P-133/112MB/SCSI-2 system. Have you been smoking the Intel crack to the point that you think a desktop OS is CPU-bound, rather than memory/swap bound?
IIRC, that was before Sony owned any movie studios.
You don't think that TrollTech makes money off of internal corporate developers? Until recent annoucements for Borland and other commercial products using Qt, that's the only place they've ever made any money.
If you can name any pre-Linux craze commercial applications that use Qt, let me know, because I don't know of any.
Since you seem to be a Novell fan, remind yourself that Novell 4.0 sales were also abysmal for the first year or two.
It took at least a year before the installed base started to comprehend the trials, troubles, benefits and bugetary implications of a directory system. Factor in the relative intelligance of NT and Novell admins.
NDS eventually took off to a degree, so 6 months of sales data isn't enough to say one way or another for W2K Server. Like Novell 3, NT4 might stay on the product list longer than expected, tho.
Late post, but this is right from the W2KS help file:
Several things happen when you change to native mode:
Domain controllers no longer support NTLM replication.
The domain controller that is emulating the PDC operations master can not synchronize data with a Windows NT BDC.
Windows NT domain controllers can not be added to the domain. (You can of course add new Windows 2000 domain controllers.)
Users and computers using previous versions of Windows begin to benefit from the transitive trusts of Active Directory and (with the proper authorization) can access resources anywhere in the forest. Although previous versions of Windows do not support the Kerberos V5 protocol, the pass-through authentication provided by the domain controllers allows users and computers to be authenticated in any domain in the forest. This enables users or computers to access resources in any domain in the forest for which they have the appropriate permissions.
Other than the enhanced access to any other domains in the forest, clients will not be aware of any changes in the domain.
Note that the only implication is that you can't use NT4-style domain controllers in your domain. That means Samba should still work fine as long as the DCs are Windows 2000.
If QT were GPLed, you could write internal corporate applications with QT without paying TrollTech, as long as you never distributed them outside of your company. That would seriously undercut Troll's revenue stream.