Microsoft

Addicted to antitrust, Microsoft outlines 12-Step Recovery

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Antitrust addict Microsoft has outlined a 12-Step Recovery Program, which it says will help prevent it from lapsing back into anti-competitive practices in the future.

The declaration follows three major “interventions” in fifteen years. A 1991 investigation by the Federal Trade Commission resulted in a Consent Decree signed in 1995. A 1997 investigation by the Department of Justice, joined by a number of US states the following year, resulted in a conviction and settlement in 2002. And just last month, the EU rejected Microsoft’s claim that it was complying with a 2004 antitrust settlement.

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Microsoft’s future file system dies, again

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Microsoft’s most ambitious software plan – to base Windows on a native database – has died again. The feature was originally touted in 1991 for ‘Cairo’, which Microsoft then described as an object-oriented operating system, built on top of Windows NT. Cairo was sidelined as a result of Microsoft’s focus on the internet, and the evaporation of the Apple/IBM Taligent OS. But the idea, reborn as WinFS, was revived in 2001 as one of the “three pillars” of Longhorn, now Windows Vista.

Now it looks as if Windows on a database won’t take place until the next decade, and there are serious doubts it will ever happen at all.

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The Canonization of St.Bill

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St Bill of Shephards Bush

If William Henry Gates the Third’s philanthropic work leads to him being canonized one day as the first secular saint of our times, I won’t stand in the way of the celebrations. Geeks get things very out of proportion, and the value of saving even one life should be more apparent to everyone than the cost of a poorly written Windows USB stack. When Microsoft is criticized, while the practices of arms dealers, pharmaceutical companies and extraction cartels around the world are ignored, its reminds us that some nerds place a very low value on human life itself.

But if Gates is to be canonized as the man who invented the PC, and without whom our lives would be poorer – as he is this evening – then we should all be troubled, as it suggests we’re suffering from a terrible case of ignorance and amnesia. More troublingly, it raises the fair question – which we hope you can help answer – of what kind of qualifications one needs to have to earn the title ‘Henry Ford Of Our Times’.

Tonight the BBC discussed Bill’s legacy, and was effectively writing the first draft of his place in history. And in that painful BBC fashion of splitting the difference and losing the truth – there are two, but never more than two sides to every story – came to its conclusion. Bill Gates had been truly innovative in his earlier career, we learned, and while “someone would have invented the PC eventually” (we paraphrase), this incredible inventiveness could still be entered in mitigation when the final reckoning came.

So, Bill invented the PC? Even excusing for media hyperbole – and this is the kind of careless, but generous exaggeration you hear when someone has died (rather than relinquished the role of “Chief Software Architect”) we would like to put a few points on the record.

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Bill Gates’ letter to hobbyists (en Français, 2006)

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Free software doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as web hucksters. Not only is it a historical continuity of the way much of our software infrastructure has been developed, but it has encouraged commercial value to built through service models, or dual licensing. It’s a pity free software and open source advocates haven’t disowned the comparisons more strongly

European Court justice Cooke gave Microsoft’s lawyers a tonic yesterday, by raising concerns about the transfer of Microsoft’s intellectual property. But one shouldn’t read too much into his intervention – the judge was playing devil’s advocate. And the trouble for Microsoft is that it needs 12 more Cookes to spoil the European Commission’s broth.

Nevertheless, Cooke’s elevation of the intellectual property issue will trouble both proprietary rivals and free software advocates alike. Arguing the moral rights of a property holder is comfortable ground for Microsoft – it would rather be staked out here than be trumpeting its bold record of innovation, or its congenial and co-operative reputation in the technology business.

And the wholesale destruction of value caused by “volunteer” projects such as Craigslist, Wikipedia or “open source” software is certainly worthy of discussion, and should not be ducked. Craigslist is a business that poses as a non-profit, and by creaming off newspapers’ classified profits, is hurting communities and shifting power to the middle-class and PC-literate by destroying what may be a community’s only universally accessible media. Wikipedia is an ersatz “encyclopedia” that’s industrialized the process of propagating unreliable information, and its only commercial value seems to be spammers, who scrape its keyword-rich content for junk websites. Free software doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as these ventures. Not only is it a historical continuity of the way much of our software infrastructure has been developed, but it has encouraged commercial value to built through service models, or dual licensing.

It’s a pity that open source and free software advocates, many of whom find such comparisons odious, haven’t disowned them more strongly. For when an influential judge lumps free software in with hucksters and hooligans, he’s only citing what’s he’s reading in the New York Times, or our best and brightest think-tanks. This is the price we pay for having a witless and inattentive press – and a punditocracy too eager to grasp shiny new shapes or diagrams.

The plot thickens, however.

Especially when one considers the little-known fact that Microsoft has already offered to give away the source code to the protocols free software developers wish to work with, then we can see Microsoft’s true intentions rather more clearly. It’s an offer too good to refuse. What on the face of it looks like the moral high ground based on a defense of property rights, is really an artful strategy to isolate and punish free software. And on that basis, you can’t fault Microsoft for inconsistency – it’s a strategy that hasn’t changed since Bill Gates’ “Letter to hobbyists” in 1976.

We’ll explain.

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The Internet Services Puddle

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What Ray Ozzie’s strategic memo really says.

Orgone

Ever the master of public relations, Microsoft has always been able to figure its way out of a tight spot with the use of a judiciously leaked memo.

Remember when AOL merged with Netscape back in 1998? Time to take a leak. Remember 2000, when Symbian was stealing the thunder from Microsoft’s cellphone strategy? Time to take a leak. Remember when the antitrust settlement talks had hit a sticky patch? Time to take a leak. Remember when Microsoft’s security woes finally became an issue? Time, once again, to take a leak.

The purpose of these releases is to bolster morale and focus the staff – Microsoft always seems to need a No.1 Enemy – and inform the press that it’s on the case.

(The memos Microsoft doesn’t want you to read such as this one and these two, are always more entertaining and enlightening.)

And so it goes. We know you’re very busy people, so in the spirit of the excellent 500-word “digested reads” offered by some of our better newspapers, we give you the précis of the latest Gates and Ozzie memos.

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Microsoft: beating itself back to health?

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It’s masochism fortnight at Redmond! Microsoft’s PR campaign of self-flagellation continues – with senior executives offering theWall Street Journal‘s Rob Guth an account of why Windows Vista will arrive so late and so incomplete. Thanks to the co-operation of Amitabh Srivastava, Brian Valentine, product manager Jim Allchin and even Gates himself – the Longhorn death … Read more

Bulwer-Lytton

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A Microsoft employee has won the Oscar of bad prose – and no, he isn’t even a weblogger.

Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest honors the best attempts to parody bad fiction. It’s judged by Professor Scott Rice at San Jose State University in California, and is now in its 22nd year.

It’s an impressive achievement, as the bar has been pushed ever higher over the years. For example, it’s hard to imagine anyone topping 2002’s winning submission from Rephah Berg:

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

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New Microsoft Longhorn chief is indigestion expert

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Microsoft has a new star hire to head up its Longhorn project, Mike Sievert. And he brings a deeper and richer personal experience to the job than many of his marketing counterparts in the technology industry.

Sievert took up the post of Corporate VP for Windows Product Management, to give him his full title, at the start of the month. He joins from AT&T Wireless, which has just been acquired by Cingular, and before that he was at E-Trade. Nothing unusual there, you might think. But once upon a time, Sievert held one of the most important marketing posts in the nation: he was brand manager for the United States’ favorite indigestion remedy, Pepto-Bismol®.

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MS-DOS paternity dispute goes to court

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The parentage of the MS-DOS operating system is to be decided in court. Tim Paterson, who sold the Intel-compatible operating system 86-DOS (aka QDOS) to Microsoft in 1980 is suing author and former Times editor Harold Evans, and his publisher Time Warner, for defamation. Paterson’s work became Microsoft’s first operating system – it subsequently rebadged QDOS as MS-DOS version 1.0, and it was made available with the original IBM PC.

In his book They Made America published last year, Evans devoted a chapter to the late, great Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research. Evans described Paterson’s software as a “rip-off” and “a slapdash clone” of Kildall’s CP/M, then the leading operating system for micro computers.

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