Why I was wrong about Microsoft

I have been reporting on Microsoft all my journalistic life, and believe me, that's quite some time. To give you an idea how far I go back with Microsoft, let's just say I remember the occasion when I was given a personal demo of a hot new product that Microsoft was about to launch – a graphical spreadsheet for the Macintosh, later known as Excel.

I was particularly impressed by the evident passion of the person demonstrating the beta code – he clearly really enjoyed his job. But perhaps that wasn't so surprising, since his name was Bill Gates.

Of course, my relationship with Microsoft changed somewhat when I discovered free software, which was in 1995. At that time, Microsoft was totally oblivious of its existence, or at least completely indifferent; it certainly perceived no threat whatsoever that I could detect when I quizzed them on it in 1996.

Things probably began to change with the infamous 1999 Mindcraft benchmarks, which Microsoft paid for. They seemed to show that Windows NT was faster than GNU/Linux as both a file and web server, although the fact that the tests were conducted in Microsoft's labs naturally caused people in the free software world to cry foul. In the end, the tests were re-run under fairer conditions, and they did indeed show that Microsoft's product was faster.

That was soon fixed – by running these tests and exposing weaknesses in the free software that was used, Microsoft had effectively submitted a rather important bug report. But the more interesting aspect was the fact that Microsoft had paid for the tests at all: you don't go to all the expense of proving you are better than someone unless you perceive them to be a threat. By publishing the results of the Mindcraft tests, Microsoft had effectively admitted officially that free software was a competitor – a big shift from its previous position.

Thereafter, Microsoft began exploring ways of undermining this increasingly worrisome upstart with a variety of FUD. Indeed, it went through so many different stories about why free software was bound to fail/couldn't be trusted/was no good that five years ago I felt compelled to write a “Brief History of Microsoft FUD” in an attempt to keep track.

Microsoft's approach included the “It's not very nice” insults – Ballmer's infamous “communism/cancer" comparisons; the “It's not very cheap” TCO studies; and culminated in the “It's not legal” argument. Actually, there were two phases to the latter. “It's not legal 1.0” was essentially SCO – and we all know how that fizzled out. As for “It's not legal 2.0”, I wrote:

Since the indirect legal FUD failed, Microsoft has taken the last, desperate option it has available: to begin direct legal FUD. Hence Ballmer's cunningly veiled threats: he's not saying Microsoft will sue somebody in the GNU/Linux world over possible violations of intellectual property, it's just something that, well, he owes it to his shareholders (like Bill Gates and himself, presumably) to consider.

That was back in 2006, and what happened on this front thereafter was remarkable: nothing. Despite all the sabre-rattling, Microsoft never really followed up on the implicit threat to sue GNU/Linux for patent infringements, with the possible exception of the 2009 TomTom lawsuit, which was settled quite quickly, and was only tangentially to do with GNU/Linux.

In fact, rather than pursuing an aggressive strategy, Microsoft suddenly seemed to have seen the light. It started making conciliatory noises, seeking to work with open source groups rather than against them. It published open source code, and it created new open source licences itself. It seemed as if the engineers were finally gaining the upper hand over the lawyers in the long-running battle for the soul of Microsoft, with the younger, savvier generation that understands why openness is a better way finally triumphing over the corporate dinosaurs that wanted to squish the pesky mammals running around their legs.

It was certainly an uplifting story of good triumphing over, well, not-so-good. Although as a cynical journalist I was obliged to be sceptical, I did begin to feel that there were grounds for optimism when it came to Microsoft's evolving attitude toward open source.

The evidence - Exhibits A & B

Judging by recent events, it's seems the dinosaurs are back with a vengeance. Here's Exhibit A, courtesy of Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel:

As you may have seen, Microsoft today filed legal actions against Barnes & Noble, Inc., Foxconn International Holdings Ltd., and Inventec Corporation in both the U.S. International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. Today’s actions focus on the patent infringement by the Nook e-reader and the Nook Color tablet, both of which run the Android operating system.

Together with the patents already asserted in the course of our litigation against Motorola, today’s actions bring to 25 the total number of Microsoft patents in litigation for infringement by Android smartphones, tablets and other devices. Microsoft is not a company that pursues litigation lightly. In fact, this is only our seventh proactive patent infringement suit in our 36-year history. But we simply cannot ignore infringement of this scope and scale.

So, by Gutierrez's own words, Microsoft does not pursue litigation “lightly”, and yet it has chosen to attack a number of companies that have in common only the fact that they are making and selling products running Android. Clearly there is something bigger going on here. Oh, and that “scope and scale” of infringement he refers to? Well, judge for yourself just how heinous the alleged crimes are:

The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:

Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.<i>

So Microsoft is seriously suing companies for allegedly infringing its patents on *selecting text* and a superimposed download bar? Give me a break; these have to be some of the most trivial patents that Microsoft has applied for, and to the USPTO's shame, been granted.

These are no great Einsteinian insights into the underlying fabric of space-time – or industrial applications therof; they are things that you or I would *instinctively* think of. No patent incentive was needed to bring these forth. The fact that Microsoft has been forced to use such risible patents shows that it simply wants to “persuade” companies through the potential inconvenience of a long, expensive trial, just enough to make paying some royalties slightly more attractive. This is intellectual monopoly bullying at its worst.

But wait, you will say, Microsoft is only doing what everyone else does, which is suing anything that moves. Moreover, it could be argued, is not attacking open source so much as Google, even though, typical bully that it is, it is not suing Google directly, but is picking on the smaller kids in the Android class.

Microsoft seems to be trying to get its own personal unfair competition laws passed state by state, so it can sue US companies who get parts from overseas companies who used pirated Microsoft software anywhere in their business. The laws allow Microsoft to block the US company from selling the finished product in the state and compel them to pay damages for what the overseas supplier did.

You heard me right. If a company overseas uses a pirated version of Excel, let's say, keeping track of how many parts it has shipped or whatever, and then sends some parts to General Motors or any large company to incorporate into the finished product, Microsoft can sue *not the overseas supplier* but General Motors, for unfair competition. So can the state's Attorney General. I kid you not. For piracy that was done by someone else, overseas. The product could be T shirts. It doesn't matter what it is, so long as it's manufactured with contributions from an overseas supplier, like in China, who didn't pay Microsoft for software that it uses somewhere in the business. It's the US company that has to pay damages, not the overseas supplier.

So how might this apply to open source? Well, consider a US carrier offering an Android handset: under the new laws, they would effectively be required to prove that not only did they not use any pirated Microsoft software, but that none of their suppliers did either. And given that many of those suppliers are likely to be in China, where piracy is not completely unknown, the chances that at least one supplier is in fact using the odd dodgy copy of Windows or Office is probably somewhat close to 1.

But it goes much further than Android. One of the biggest growth areas for Linux is consumer electronics. Many of the most exciting low-cost digital consumer products are running stripped-down and customised versions of Linux at their heart – and not Microsoft's Windows CE. Again, retailers and importers of those Linux-based systems would need to be able to prove that not a single one of their suppliers had a single pirated copy of Microsoft products anywhere. If they couldn't, Microsoft could effectively block the import of those products into the US states that have passed this new legislation.

In other words, this law has huge ramifications for open source, despite the fact that at first glance it might seem to have nothing to do with it (in fact, open source is expressly *excluded* from enjoying similar rights under the new laws against copyright infringement, which is an interesting asymmetry....)

On Friday, several large computer-hardware corporations sent a joint letter urging legislators to vote no on the bill. Many are Microsoft's partners – Dell, IBM, Intel and Hewlett-Packard.

"These bills would create a new and unjustified cause of action against many American employers, fueling business uncertainty, disrupting our supply chains and undermining the competitiveness of U.S. firms," the companies wrote in the letter.

Unlike patent litigation, then, which is widely used by US computer companies, this new law would give Microsoft unique advantages – not least against free software.

This latest trend to devise and deploy legal strategies against open source seems to me to represent an admission on Microsoft's part that it can no longer compete on technology. Instead, the dinosaurs have decided that it's time to play really dirty – and nothing is dirtier than enforcing bad monopolies using worse laws.

To give you an idea how far I go back with Microsoft, let's just say I remember the occasion when I was given a personal demo of a hot new product that Microsoft was about to launch – a graphical spreadsheet for the Macintosh, later known as Excel.

I would have been impressed if he said "Multiplan." I don't go back that far, but I did right about the "forthcoming" MSX home computing software standard and the MS-BASIC featured on the Spectravideo SV-318/328 (1983). Those were the days.

Thanks for the post.

Nothing about what he described surprises me. I think Microsoft understands that the “improvements” to recent copies of their core product “MS Office” are very superficial and almost no users find them useful. At the same time the down economy, cost of software upgrades and availability of Open Source equivalents (loose term) make their market position less secure.

I have been using Linux of some flavor since the release of Redhat 5.0 That is a while back.

"on Microsoft's part that it can no longer compete on technology"

Oh, please, Glyn Moody. Microsoft was never able to compete on technology.

I remember the "OS Wars" back in the 90's. OS/2 was a far superior Operating System in terms of efficiency, performance, stability, reliability and security, to any version of Windows.

On technological grounds, OS/2 could have wiped the floor with Windows.

But Microsoft, Gates, Ballmer and the rest of those thieves used every method of FUD available. And they proceeded to invent all kinds of new FUD techniques.

You, Glyn Moody, and your cronies in the media, swallowed all the FUD Microsoft fed you. You went to the elaborate parties in Redmond; you sat up and begged for scraps from the MS "announcement" and product launch teams; you took the MS spin and destroyed OS/2 and its great technology.

But you also destroyed the careers of many OS/2 developers and implementers. I know from personal experience.

You and the rest of your media whores got your pieces of silver from Gates and Ballmer. Now you're feeling regrets?

Go hang yourself.

The “TRaSh-80” Model I was not a bad computer. It largely suffered from Radio Shack’s image as being to low grade for real techies (though I grew up with those red P-Box kits.)

The MS Basic (that Gates did for a flat $10,000, his biggest mistake early on) was very good (Level 2 incarnation, at least. I believe that Tandy made the right trade-off when they went with a 65 character line rather than cheesy TV tube 32-40 char color. Lower case should have been built-in.

I couldn’t afford one of those, but a friend had a job programming one at home, and we got to play Flying Saucers and Invasion Force ... oh the wasted hours.

OS/2 was a far superior Operating System in terms of efficiency, performance, stability, reliability and security, to any version of Windows.

Microsoft co-wrote OS/2. They also talked IBM into going 16 bit in the first iteration on behalf of all of those '286 boxes still around. This made IBM's 32-bit Microchannel pretty useless.

You are of course right about Microsoft undermining OS/2 in order to make a breach for Windows. IBM, however, is not some little start-up, and they themselves were (and are) ambivalent about desktop computing. They had the means to fight back, they apparently were lacking either the will and/or the brains to do it.

It didn't help that the first true PS/2 boxes (Models 50 and 80) were garbage.

No doubt IBM was grossly incompetent in the Personal Computer arena.

But I was trying to emphasize the media's effects. They were highly biased toward Microsoft then.

I suspected that the PC media folks identified closely with Gates - he was, after all, one of them. He didn't wear suits or ties. But the "Blue Meanies" at IBM did. Heck, they even had IBM songs back then.

Of course, Gates and Ballmer played the media like violins.

Anyway, my main point was that the PC media did NOT report on the technological issues. They reported based on their feelings.

It's the same as the political media. They report on their bias, not the true issues.

We lose in both cases, politically and technologically, we get stuck with the media's droppings. We deserve better than that!

Whatever do they teach in Journalist Schools?

You heard me right. If a company overseas uses a pirated version of Excel, let's say, keeping track of how many parts it has shipped or whatever, and then sends some parts to General Motors or any large company to incorporate into the finished product, Microsoft can sue *not the overseas supplier* but General Motors, for unfair competition. Actually that's a pretty good idea not just for Microsoft but other things as well. It's a good way to get FAIR trade with China. Companies will be less likely to use China as an outsourcer while these issues exist so this force chinese companies to clean up their act.

It’s not hard to figure out what is going on here. Microsoft’s core product line—end user operating systems—is fracturing, and they don’t have any way to stop it.

The move is to web services. A central web server that supplies content to a web browser. In that model, it doesn’t matter what operating system the user is running—as long as it is running a browser (or other program) that interacts with the web server in a standard way.

Microsoft has never dominated the backend (server side). Unix has always been the big dog there.

This is all part of a bigger move of getting away from personal computers, and moving to “personal devices”. Devices where it won’t matter what OS you run.

On technological grounds, OS/2 could have wiped the floor with Windows.

I had a boss who used to say something like, "OS/2? That's 'half an operating system.'"

And I believed him. Until, lemme see, 1996, when somebody gave me a copy of OS/2 (red spine) and I loaded it up.

I wasn't sure whether I would rather spit or just go blind. OS/2 was so much better than Windows in every way: Presentation Manager actually responded to the state of the objects represented on the screen, the API was clean and sensible, and, given enough RAM (which I had) the multitasking was clean and smooth.

And then IBM stopped development. Grrr...I still have several copies of OS/2 around, including one unopened full-pack, which I can't bring myself to throw out.

Of course, I use Linux now, and for years had a Microsoft-free home.

I remember getting a demo version of Excel that would run straight on DOS but had the same GUI as early Windows Excel versions. I think they were trying to sell the concept of Windows as well as the apps themselves to DOS users. I hated VisiCalc and Lotus and actually used the demo version as my standard work spreadsheet.

But I was trying to emphasize the media's effects. They were highly biased toward Microsoft then.

A lot of us were. When IBM came out with the PS/2, IBM was charging hefty fees for MCA and I believe even VGA and PS/2, and they charged an enormous amount for these sturdy boxes with sturdy power supplies that were slower and clunkier than the ISA (later EISA) counterparts.

Microsoft, to us, had no hardware dog in the game (mice and 286 add-in cards don't count), and opened up a practical OS to the world. First it started with the quasi-compatible MS-DOS boxes (Columbia, Eagle, DEC, Sanyo) and then the true compatibles (Compaq, PC's Limited, Leading Edge, Gateway, Tandon, etc.) then scores of mobo manufacturers and a huge DIY industry reflected by the 800 page tabloid sized Computer Shopper.

In those days, the $80 for DOS seemed like a bargain when a decent home built rig with even a '286 would run $1,500 or more. When Microsoft sold Windows 2.0 (or Windows 286, even though it ran fine on my 8088-10) for $40 to students, I rushed and got me a copy. For comparison, a cheap hard drive (ST-225, 20 MB) was $250, a color monitor $350 and up, memory was hundreds per MEGABYTE.

At the time, we had no idea that MS would take their DOS hegemony and parlay it into application hegemony. Remember, in those days, PC spreadsheets were Lotus 1-2-3. Databases were dBase III+ and (non MS) Fox Base, Word Processing was Wordstar, then Multimate, then WordPerfect. The closest thing to an "office" product was Symphony and Framework. In that world, the DOS world, Microsoft wasn't much of a threat. Except for Excel, Microsoft applications were okay, and there, but were not considered best of breed (e.g. DOS Word) and even utilities were the domain of other companies like Quarterdeck and Borland.

I would make the case that Microsoft was the good guys in the DOS days, because IBM would have kept their stuff closed and expensive. The rest of us (who could afford neither Macs nor true IBMs) would have wound up with Kaypros running CPM, Atari STs, Amigas and pirated IBM clones. The Unix folks STILL would not have gotten their act together, and the other *nixes could not have flourished without a sorta non-proprietary hardware platform (x86) to work off of. The price of commercial grade software would have stayed high longer.

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