On Mon, 4 May 1998, Kathy E. Gill wrote:
> http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/content/zdnn/0501/312847.html
>
> Good Grief.
>
> I hope the lawyers at Justice get their heads out of their ....
>
> First we had : "get 500 new folks using MSIE and we'll give you $1800 of NT
> software"
>
> Now we have : "buy the new MS handheld and get a free upgrade to Win98"
>
I'm amazed at their continuing gall. To be honest, I really don't think
MS has the slightest clue what the law says. if they did, they wouldn't
leave gems like these lying around in internal memos for the DoJ to find:
Microsoft's Christian Wildfeuer , Feb. 24, 1997:
"It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market
share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important
to leverage the OS asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator."
Microsoft Group Vice President Paul Maritz, Jan. 2, 1997:
"I am convinced we have to use Windows -- this is the one thing they
don't have."
Microsoft Senior Vice President Allchin, Dec. 20, 1996:
"Unless Microsoft were to "leverage Windows ... I don't understand how IE
is going to win ... Maybe being free helps us, but
once people are used to a product, it is hard to change them ... My
conclusion is that we must leverage Windows more."
"Memphis (Microsoft's code name for Windows 98) must be a simple upgrade,
but most importantly it must be a killer on
OEM shipments so that Netscape never gets a chance on these systems."
Microsoft senior executive Brad Chase, April 21, 1997:
"Memphis is a key weapon in the IE share battle."
Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, July 1996 e-mail report on his attempt to
persuade Intuit CEO Scott Cook to use Internet Explorer
with Quicken:
``I was quite frank with him (Cook) that if he had a favor we could do
for him that would cost us something like $1M to do that
in return for switching browsers in the next few months, I would be open
to doing that.''
MS uses this same approach in every single market. If MS didn't have
windows, how many of their products do you really think would be as
widespread as they are?
IMHO, this is what
the DoJ should have gone after, and what is truly the anti-trust issue.
They backed down from this (so far) and took the nice touchy-feely
issues. It's like MS is making bullets and giving them away, but the DoJ
can't figure out how to load the gun.
B
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