I'm sorry that I had to call you on your typical "Take the comment out context and manipulate it" ploy. Reading the whole email does *NOT* say what you claim it does.
It's saying, quite specifically, that Microsoft apps cannot use the API's if they don't let their competitors use them. Yes, it's killing a set of API's, but it's also saying "Our apps can't use them either".
Why should Microsoft be under any compunction to provide free API's to a competitor if they themselves are not getting any value from them. It would be wrong of Microsoft to withdraw the API's, then use them in their apps. That didn't happen, and the emails point that out.
Kinect is both a technology and a product. There is the Kinect product, and the technology it's based on. Kinect isn't the inovation, the technology it uses is. Kinect is just a game controller, its technology is what makes it special.
People may not "specifically" want Windows or Office because they're Windows or Office. They want them because other OS's don't give them the ability to easily run the apps they want to run, or open the documents they want to open.
This is the same reason people choose an iPhone over an Android (or vice versa). Because it has the apps they want, or because they want what everyone else has.
Perhaps you should learn your history. You're talking about the AARD code, which was never enabled in a shipping version of Windows. And, there were legetimate bugs in DR DOS that novell acknowledge that made it buggy to run Windows on it.
"So whenever I've heard accusations that Microsoft practices so-called "cruel coding" to keep Windows from running on DR DOS, I look at the facts: Windows 3.1 Enhanced mode does run on DR DOS. Standard mode does not run, but that's because of a DR DOS bug acknowledged by Novell (see Undocumented DOS, Second Edition)."
"Consequently, if you didn't know how the error message in Figure 1 was generated, it's reasonable to think that it's the manifestation of yet another bug in Novell DOS. (It wouldn't be the first time company N's bug has been misinterpreted as company M's "deliberate incompatibility.")"
But, in the end, the point is that when Microsoft shipped Windows 3.1, it did so without the AARD code enabled.
Actually, Kuwait was completely justified. Repelling Sadams forces there was the right thing to do. We pushed Sadam back and re-instanted the legal government and stepped back. Going into Iraq was a lot more muddy though.
And no, France did not control Vietnam anymore. Vietnam officially granted Vietnam independance in 1954, and they were done with it.
I'm not contradicting anyone. I'm saying that the argument that Microsoft killed DOS and thus killed DOS apps is false. That isn't mutually exclusive with end users not wanting DOS apps anymore.
In those days, there wasn't a BSA or any real way for them to get in trouble. And Netscape did no enforcement. Yes, a Fortune 50 would want to make sure they were on the up and up with licensing costs, but it was far more common for software to be installed willy nilly than it is today. In fact, most corporations didn't have any way to make sure users didn't install such software on their systems themselves.
If you read the actual full email from Gates, it says something very different from what you're trying to imply. Gates is specifically saying that Office and other apps can't use the API's. He's saying that the API's shouldn't be published, and that Capone and Marvel can't use them either, in effect saying that MS apps should not get special treatment.
The email has to be read as a whole, not just a few choice snippets that take it out of context. For instance, this part was conveniently left out:
"It is hard to know how much actual market benefit IShellBrowser integration would bring. I believe Chicago will be very successful either way. Unfortunately I don't think the integration will have amarked effect in terms of Capone competing with cc:Mail, so that battle will have to be won on other grounds" (this is saying that he doesn't think allowing Capone (Basically what became Microsoft Exchange) to have special access to the explorer API's would be of any benefit. And he's saying that they will have to compete in other ways, and not via shell integration.
If you read the entire email, it gives a very different picture, although you have to have some context of understanding what they're talking about. They're deciding whether or not the API's should be published, and some are arguing that Capone and Marvel should be considered part of the OS itself, and have special access. Meanwhile, Gates and Silverberg (the guy running the Windows team at the time) said no, they can't be considered to have special access. From the PDF file:
Brad Silverberg: "There is no one in the world outside of Microsoft who will buy the argument that they [Capone and Marvel] are "part of chicago" so get the interfaces while others don't. This an impossible sale".
Just because Spyglass did not get a "realistic" percentage of the value that MS gained doesn't mean this deal injured them. It simply didn't give them the benefit they wanted.
Spyglass got $10 million out of the deal in total, and they had 120 customers for their product. My guess is that this price was more than any of their other customers paid. Microsoft created a better "html rendering library" in IE and most of those customers moved to using IE's rendering engine instead of Spyglasses.
Which means, you can't take anything from a complaint as fact, because the lawyers make any claim they can think of, whether they know it to be true or not in the hopes they might pull one over on the judge or jury.
Except that MS did not kill DOS, at least not for another 6 years after Windows 95. All those DOS apps ran fine in Windows 95.
People didn't want DOS apps, they wanted Windows apps, but Lotus, Ashton Tate, and Wordperfect sat back and said "Hey, let's see how this windows thing turns out before we do anything", meanwhile Microsoft had bet the farm on it.
Vietnam wasn't a war, it was a police action. We were there at the behest of south vietnam government. We were basically "hired guns". War requires occupation, which means that not only are there troops there, but we're also the government. Unlike the situation in Iraq where we overthrew the government and installed our own.
I'm talking about Windows 3.1, not Windows 95. Try 5 years earlier. Before Novell bought Wordperfect.
Also, no. Microsoft did NOT withdraw any API's from Windows 95 a month before it shipped. Windows 95 was RTM'd on July 11, 1995 and shipped August 25th 2005. That means it was finalized 6 weeks before it shipped. What's more, Windows 95 was basically static since December 2004, and went through extensive beta testing with only minor bug fixes and no feature changes.
That's simply not true. I'd thank you to point to an actual document, not the entire archive of comes v microsoft to support your claim.
I know what you're referring to, though. Items 75, 76, and 77 of Novell's complaint. However, the complaint contradicts itself in numerous places. For instance, it claims "In public test versions of Windows 95 released a few months before the final product shipped to consumers, ripped out these programming interfaces without warning to Novell." Ok, a few months not "a month", but let's look further.
"Thereafter, when Microsoft released Windows 95 and Office 95, at virtually the same time, Microsoft suddenly reversed course and documented the programming interfaces. Doing so voided the alternatives that Microsoft previously forced Novell to expend an entire year developing and, at the precise moment when WordPerfect needed to enter the market, forced Novell to spend additional time designing basic functions of WordPerfect all over again."
Uhh.. ok. So where exactly does the "year of development" come from? First Novell claims that "a few months" before the release, microsoft withdrew the API's, then when the release actually happened they claim Microsot then again documented them. At most, this could be, by definition, "a few months" and not a whole years worht of development, other wise Novell would have had to have started their development a year before the release of Windows 95 in order for their "years worth of work" to be voided when Windows 95 and Office 95 were released at the same time, and the API's documented.
Then there's the point that if Microsoft simply withdrew the API's and then redocumented them, all the work they had done previous should have still be valid. They didn't just "throw away the code", it was still there. If the API's suddenly start working again, their previous code would have started working again.
It all makes no sense, and is contradictory. The only conclusion one can come to is that Novell was making crap up, and they lost track of their lies. These are Novell's own words.
Then there is the claim that Novell made that they had to redesign their program because Windows 95 wasn't a pure 32 bit OS, and made the claim that 16 bit applications would not run correctly on a 32 bit OS (complete BS). This is of course a lie, because 16 bit code worked just fine, even on NT which WAS a pure 32 bit system. It's such a ridiculous claim that its laughable.
Oh, here's another fun one "Microsoft refused to publish the APIs that were used to place items on the Windows Clipboard, although its own developers had the documentation. The Clipboard provided a location for storing information until it was "pasted" into another application. Novell ultimately had to forgo this functionality in its applications because the expenditure of time and resources required to duplicate the hidden APIs was prohibitive, so Novell could not provide the same richness of data integration that Microsoft's applications could provide."
The clipboard functions were documented in 1992 When microsoft published the Win32 API for Windows NT. It was in book form, from publishers. Not beta information. The clipboard api did not change in Windows 95 in any way. Wow.
Here's another good one "Further, Microsoft unilaterally announced that OLE would be incorporated directly into Windows, instead of existing independently of the operating system as a technology to be adopted or rejected by ISVs, depending on their assessments of its technical merit."
No, Netscapes main source of revenue was their Web *SERVER*, which they sold for many thousands of dollars per license. The browser was something they had to do to sell server licenses, because a server is useless without a client.
I'm sure netscape intended to one day capitalize the browser market, but they were too busy giving it away, and assumed the market would always be there. It wasn't.
Yes, Microsoft said many things. Don't you think the execs at google sit around and talk about how they're gong to crush iPhone and Bing? That's called propoganda, and it's what people have to believe in order to continue working on something. If they thought it would be second or third best, why bother?
Ironically, where Microsoft REALLY destroyed Netscape was when they shipped IIS with Windows NT at no additional cost, and kept improving it. Plus, they were being crushed on the open source side by Apache as well. Arguably, Apache did much more damage.
I disagree that Microsoft spent much of any effort stifling competition. The majority of their effort was spent in product development and marketing. You talk about various OEM contracts and what not, but do you really think Microsoft's 30,000 programmers had anything to do with that? Their sales staff was significantly smaller than their development staff.
Wow. You completely missed the point. Hint: Individual products are not technologies. Just because some product plugs two existing technologies together doesn't make it innovative.
And using government funded technologies like TCP/IP and ARPAnet is just dishonest.
And, company donated open source is not the same thing as an open source project that is born that way, and grows by community. companies donate to open source for various reasons, but they aren't open source developed projects. They're proprietary projects that are donated to open source.
As for your "more" projects. Really? LLVM? a set of compiler tools that are in themselves not particularly innovative? a CMS that was itself a fork of another CMS? A video player that does nothing new or unique that hasn't been done by others for decades? and a project that hacks proprietary hardware? Wow, the bottom of the dregs there.
I'm talking about real innovation here. Stuff like 3D Compositing UI's. No, Open source did not invent that. Apple did, years before the first version of XGL hit the wires. In fact, Microsoft was one of the first to provide the basic technologies used for compositing UI's with Windows GDI+ released with Windows 2000. Apple took it to the next level with Quartz. Microsoft was showing Wobbly windows demonstrations of the early longhorn alphas in 2002, 4 years before Linux got XGL.
Now THAT is innovation, and open source was nowhere to be found until years later. THAT is something that is a fundamental change in the way we use computers. Nearly every major jump in software technology has come from either government or endowment funding, or commercial funding. The key there is "funding", something traditional open source projects just don't have.
Are you seriously trying to say that Open Source innovates anything? Like what? I can't think of a single technology that Open Source has done first and been copied by commercial versions, but I can think of tons of cases of the reverse.
You still remember that day huh? That's interesting, because it never happened. No google results. Nothing in the conspiracy theory archives. Strange that.
More than likely, you're conflating multiple different events and mixing them up and putting a netscape tag on it. Certainly, updates to Windows have broken apps, but never because they removed a dll. Most apps break when a new OS is released because the apps were relying on some undocumented functionality that changes in an update. It happens on Macs, it happens on Linux, and it happens on Windows.
Microsoft goes out of their way to make broken apps work in Windows, even competitors. Microsoft actually had to put bugs back in the OS to make various apps function properly on some versions of Windows. On Windows 9x systems, there was a file that contained "hack bits" that were used to enable certain processes to turn on compatibility features for them, so they wouldn't break.
Technically, yes. But you could download Netscape for free, from Netscapes Web or FTP site, and never pay a fee. Even if you were a business. There was nobody checking up on this. What's more, there was the "beta" clause, even businesses could run beta versions free, and there was always a beta version available.
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I'm sorry that I had to call you on your typical "Take the comment out context and manipulate it" ploy. Reading the whole email does *NOT* say what you claim it does.
It's saying, quite specifically, that Microsoft apps cannot use the API's if they don't let their competitors use them. Yes, it's killing a set of API's, but it's also saying "Our apps can't use them either".
Why should Microsoft be under any compunction to provide free API's to a competitor if they themselves are not getting any value from them. It would be wrong of Microsoft to withdraw the API's, then use them in their apps. That didn't happen, and the emails point that out.
It was morally wrong to say "If our competitors don't have access to these API's, then our apps shouldn't as well"?
That's the problem with taking them out of context.
You do realize that both Apple and Linux run device drivers in Ring 0 as well, right?
There was a Vietnam war, but that war was between South Vietnam and North Vietnam. The US and China, respectively, were there to support each side.
By your definition, the US Revolutionary war was a war between France and England. France supported us, but was not at war with England themselves.
Kinect is both a technology and a product. There is the Kinect product, and the technology it's based on. Kinect isn't the inovation, the technology it uses is. Kinect is just a game controller, its technology is what makes it special.
People may not "specifically" want Windows or Office because they're Windows or Office. They want them because other OS's don't give them the ability to easily run the apps they want to run, or open the documents they want to open.
This is the same reason people choose an iPhone over an Android (or vice versa). Because it has the apps they want, or because they want what everyone else has.
Perhaps you should learn your history. You're talking about the AARD code, which was never enabled in a shipping version of Windows. And, there were legetimate bugs in DR DOS that novell acknowledge that made it buggy to run Windows on it.
http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/NonZen_Companies/Microsoft/Tactics/1993.09.01.Locks_Out_DrDOS.html
"So whenever I've heard accusations that Microsoft practices so-called "cruel coding" to keep Windows from running on DR DOS, I look at the facts: Windows 3.1 Enhanced mode does run on DR DOS. Standard mode does not run, but that's because of a DR DOS bug acknowledged by Novell (see Undocumented DOS, Second Edition)."
"Consequently, if you didn't know how the error message in Figure 1 was generated, it's reasonable to think that it's the manifestation of yet another bug in Novell DOS. (It wouldn't be the first time company N's bug has been misinterpreted as company M's "deliberate incompatibility.")"
But, in the end, the point is that when Microsoft shipped Windows 3.1, it did so without the AARD code enabled.
No, I was merely pointing out that he didn't have the balls to put his name next to his words. Even his psuedonym.
Actually, Kuwait was completely justified. Repelling Sadams forces there was the right thing to do. We pushed Sadam back and re-instanted the legal government and stepped back. Going into Iraq was a lot more muddy though.
And no, France did not control Vietnam anymore. Vietnam officially granted Vietnam independance in 1954, and they were done with it.
I'm not contradicting anyone. I'm saying that the argument that Microsoft killed DOS and thus killed DOS apps is false. That isn't mutually exclusive with end users not wanting DOS apps anymore.
In those days, there wasn't a BSA or any real way for them to get in trouble. And Netscape did no enforcement. Yes, a Fortune 50 would want to make sure they were on the up and up with licensing costs, but it was far more common for software to be installed willy nilly than it is today. In fact, most corporations didn't have any way to make sure users didn't install such software on their systems themselves.
VisiCalc was already dead, that article is talking about Visi On, a GUI not a spreadsheet.
If you read the actual full email from Gates, it says something very different from what you're trying to imply. Gates is specifically saying that Office and other apps can't use the API's. He's saying that the API's shouldn't be published, and that Capone and Marvel can't use them either, in effect saying that MS apps should not get special treatment.
The email has to be read as a whole, not just a few choice snippets that take it out of context. For instance, this part was conveniently left out:
"It is hard to know how much actual market benefit IShellBrowser integration would bring. I believe Chicago will be very successful either way. Unfortunately I don't think the integration will have amarked effect in terms of Capone competing with cc:Mail, so that battle will have to be won on other grounds" (this is saying that he doesn't think allowing Capone (Basically what became Microsoft Exchange) to have special access to the explorer API's would be of any benefit. And he's saying that they will have to compete in other ways, and not via shell integration.
If you read the entire email, it gives a very different picture, although you have to have some context of understanding what they're talking about. They're deciding whether or not the API's should be published, and some are arguing that Capone and Marvel should be considered part of the OS itself, and have special access. Meanwhile, Gates and Silverberg (the guy running the Windows team at the time) said no, they can't be considered to have special access. From the PDF file:
Brad Silverberg: "There is no one in the world outside of Microsoft who will buy the argument that they [Capone and Marvel] are "part of chicago" so get the interfaces while others don't. This an impossible sale".
Just because Spyglass did not get a "realistic" percentage of the value that MS gained doesn't mean this deal injured them. It simply didn't give them the benefit they wanted.
Spyglass got $10 million out of the deal in total, and they had 120 customers for their product. My guess is that this price was more than any of their other customers paid. Microsoft created a better "html rendering library" in IE and most of those customers moved to using IE's rendering engine instead of Spyglasses.
Which means, you can't take anything from a complaint as fact, because the lawyers make any claim they can think of, whether they know it to be true or not in the hopes they might pull one over on the judge or jury.
WTF?
Are you suggesting that 9/11 was the same thing as Vietnam? Really? Good thing you said that as an AC.
The US went into vietnam at the south vietnamese governments request. I think there's a little bit of difference there.
Except that MS did not kill DOS, at least not for another 6 years after Windows 95. All those DOS apps ran fine in Windows 95.
People didn't want DOS apps, they wanted Windows apps, but Lotus, Ashton Tate, and Wordperfect sat back and said "Hey, let's see how this windows thing turns out before we do anything", meanwhile Microsoft had bet the farm on it.
And Windows 3.1 to Windows 95 was over 3 years.
Vietnam wasn't a war, it was a police action. We were there at the behest of south vietnam government. We were basically "hired guns". War requires occupation, which means that not only are there troops there, but we're also the government. Unlike the situation in Iraq where we overthrew the government and installed our own.
I'm talking about Windows 3.1, not Windows 95. Try 5 years earlier. Before Novell bought Wordperfect.
Also, no. Microsoft did NOT withdraw any API's from Windows 95 a month before it shipped. Windows 95 was RTM'd on July 11, 1995 and shipped August 25th 2005. That means it was finalized 6 weeks before it shipped. What's more, Windows 95 was basically static since December 2004, and went through extensive beta testing with only minor bug fixes and no feature changes.
That's simply not true. I'd thank you to point to an actual document, not the entire archive of comes v microsoft to support your claim.
I know what you're referring to, though. Items 75, 76, and 77 of Novell's complaint. However, the complaint contradicts itself in numerous places. For instance, it claims "In public test versions of Windows 95 released a few months before the final product shipped to consumers, ripped out these programming interfaces without warning to Novell." Ok, a few months not "a month", but let's look further.
"Thereafter, when Microsoft released Windows 95 and Office 95, at virtually the same time, Microsoft suddenly reversed course and documented the programming interfaces. Doing so voided the alternatives that Microsoft previously forced Novell to expend an entire year developing and, at the precise moment when WordPerfect needed to enter the market, forced Novell to spend additional time designing basic functions of WordPerfect all over again."
Uhh.. ok. So where exactly does the "year of development" come from? First Novell claims that "a few months" before the release, microsoft withdrew the API's, then when the release actually happened they claim Microsot then again documented them. At most, this could be, by definition, "a few months" and not a whole years worht of development, other wise Novell would have had to have started their development a year before the release of Windows 95 in order for their "years worth of work" to be voided when Windows 95 and Office 95 were released at the same time, and the API's documented.
Then there's the point that if Microsoft simply withdrew the API's and then redocumented them, all the work they had done previous should have still be valid. They didn't just "throw away the code", it was still there. If the API's suddenly start working again, their previous code would have started working again.
It all makes no sense, and is contradictory. The only conclusion one can come to is that Novell was making crap up, and they lost track of their lies. These are Novell's own words.
Then there is the claim that Novell made that they had to redesign their program because Windows 95 wasn't a pure 32 bit OS, and made the claim that 16 bit applications would not run correctly on a 32 bit OS (complete BS). This is of course a lie, because 16 bit code worked just fine, even on NT which WAS a pure 32 bit system. It's such a ridiculous claim that its laughable.
Oh, here's another fun one "Microsoft refused to publish the APIs that were used to place items on the Windows Clipboard, although its own developers had the documentation. The Clipboard provided a location for storing information until it was "pasted" into another application. Novell ultimately had to forgo this functionality in its applications because the expenditure of time and resources required to duplicate the hidden APIs was prohibitive, so Novell could not provide the same richness of data integration that Microsoft's applications could provide."
The clipboard functions were documented in 1992 When microsoft published the Win32 API for Windows NT. It was in book form, from publishers. Not beta information. The clipboard api did not change in Windows 95 in any way. Wow.
Here's another good one "Further, Microsoft unilaterally announced that OLE would be incorporated directly into Windows, instead of existing independently of the operating system as a technology to be adopted or rejected by ISVs, depending on their assessments of its technical merit."
No, Netscapes main source of revenue was their Web *SERVER*, which they sold for many thousands of dollars per license. The browser was something they had to do to sell server licenses, because a server is useless without a client.
I'm sure netscape intended to one day capitalize the browser market, but they were too busy giving it away, and assumed the market would always be there. It wasn't.
Yes, Microsoft said many things. Don't you think the execs at google sit around and talk about how they're gong to crush iPhone and Bing? That's called propoganda, and it's what people have to believe in order to continue working on something. If they thought it would be second or third best, why bother?
Ironically, where Microsoft REALLY destroyed Netscape was when they shipped IIS with Windows NT at no additional cost, and kept improving it. Plus, they were being crushed on the open source side by Apache as well. Arguably, Apache did much more damage.
I disagree that Microsoft spent much of any effort stifling competition. The majority of their effort was spent in product development and marketing. You talk about various OEM contracts and what not, but do you really think Microsoft's 30,000 programmers had anything to do with that? Their sales staff was significantly smaller than their development staff.
Government funded. Secret for years before being released.
Wow. You completely missed the point. Hint: Individual products are not technologies. Just because some product plugs two existing technologies together doesn't make it innovative.
And using government funded technologies like TCP/IP and ARPAnet is just dishonest.
And, company donated open source is not the same thing as an open source project that is born that way, and grows by community. companies donate to open source for various reasons, but they aren't open source developed projects. They're proprietary projects that are donated to open source.
As for your "more" projects. Really? LLVM? a set of compiler tools that are in themselves not particularly innovative? a CMS that was itself a fork of another CMS? A video player that does nothing new or unique that hasn't been done by others for decades? and a project that hacks proprietary hardware? Wow, the bottom of the dregs there.
I'm talking about real innovation here. Stuff like 3D Compositing UI's. No, Open source did not invent that. Apple did, years before the first version of XGL hit the wires. In fact, Microsoft was one of the first to provide the basic technologies used for compositing UI's with Windows GDI+ released with Windows 2000. Apple took it to the next level with Quartz. Microsoft was showing Wobbly windows demonstrations of the early longhorn alphas in 2002, 4 years before Linux got XGL.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compositing_window_manager
Now THAT is innovation, and open source was nowhere to be found until years later. THAT is something that is a fundamental change in the way we use computers. Nearly every major jump in software technology has come from either government or endowment funding, or commercial funding. The key there is "funding", something traditional open source projects just don't have.
Now how about something like A
Are you seriously trying to say that Open Source innovates anything? Like what? I can't think of a single technology that Open Source has done first and been copied by commercial versions, but I can think of tons of cases of the reverse.
Can you think of any?
You still remember that day huh? That's interesting, because it never happened. No google results. Nothing in the conspiracy theory archives. Strange that.
More than likely, you're conflating multiple different events and mixing them up and putting a netscape tag on it. Certainly, updates to Windows have broken apps, but never because they removed a dll. Most apps break when a new OS is released because the apps were relying on some undocumented functionality that changes in an update. It happens on Macs, it happens on Linux, and it happens on Windows.
Microsoft goes out of their way to make broken apps work in Windows, even competitors. Microsoft actually had to put bugs back in the OS to make various apps function properly on some versions of Windows. On Windows 9x systems, there was a file that contained "hack bits" that were used to enable certain processes to turn on compatibility features for them, so they wouldn't break.
Technically, yes. But you could download Netscape for free, from Netscapes Web or FTP site, and never pay a fee. Even if you were a business. There was nobody checking up on this. What's more, there was the "beta" clause, even businesses could run beta versions free, and there was always a beta version available.