Founder of Go Computer, Inc. sues Microsoft 370
wantobe writes "From Yahoo! News 'Microsoft saw Go's PC operating system as a serious threat to its operating system monopoly and took swift covert action to 'kill' it just as it did the Netscape/Sun Java threat to its monopoly," according to Go's private action in federal court. '
Are Kaplan's complaints warranted, or is he just taking advantage of some recent Microsoft court losses and trying to get his cut? "
Re:Kooks (Score:0, Informative)
Sniff.
Poor liddle Microsoft. Why won't all these 'kooks' just leave them alone! Leave them alone to carry out their long time company policy of IP theft and sleaze.
Startup : A Silicon Valley Adventure (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Kooks (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Kooks (Score:5, Informative)
Get Barbarians Led by Bill Gates: Microsoft from the Inside [amazon.com] and learn some history. Written by a former MS employee it has some stuff about what happened back then around Go and Microsoft.
Re:Kooks (Score:2, Informative)
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
Could you at least read the very first paragraph of TFA?
"The founder of Go Computer, a pioneer of pen-based computing that was once seen as a possible alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s operating systems, filed antitrust lawsuits against Microsoft last week"
Is too (Score:4, Informative)
Au contraire, it is officially [wikipedia.org] ("Judge Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999 that Microsoft's dominance of the personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly.").
Re:Kooks (Score:5, Informative)
``I guess I've made it very clear that we view an Intel investment in Go as an anti-Microsoft move, both because Go competes with our systems software and because we think it will weaken the 386 PC standard. . . I'm asking you not to make any investment in Go Corporation,''
In his book, Startup, Kaplan describes how they shared trade secrets with Microsoft, something they were not keen on doing, but Microsoft promised to set a "Chinese wall" between their app division and the OS division, so only the applications people would know and that they'd be able to produce software in support of Go. In this excerpt from Startup, Kaplan details how Microsoft's app division made us of confidential information [amazon.com] Go had shared with them to create Pen Windows, which, even as vapourware, effectively killed Go.
Re:Will this be like the Be, Inc. lawsuit? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Geez (Score:5, Informative)
Where "better" is (as you note) defined as "more compatible with Microsoft's existing product". Where the competition was compatible, Microsoft changed their software to make it incompatible (this is not simply speculation, it's well documented by MS employees and in MS memos). Microsoft really DID have that kind of power to cripple a competing product back in 1987 (or the early '90s: Windows wasn't really usable until Windows 3.11 and the 386 came together).
But the key thing that you're missing is that the fact that "better" means "more compatible with DOS" means that Microsoft was starting the race at the finish line.
all the dirt on this and other misconduct (Score:4, Informative)
Pretty damning stuff.
Microsoft is a Criminal (Score:4, Informative)
Cases like Go's lawsuit are _NOT_ frivilous attempts to get money out of Microsoft. On the contrary, Microsoft has had a series of losses in court BECAUSE MICROSOFT WAS GUILTY.
In just the last few years, Microsoft was found guilty of criminal behaviour by the DOJ, and has had to make massive payouts to Sun, Novell, IBM, Apple, and others. Those are not companies that got rich through frivilous lawsuits.
Microsoft's standard method of operation has been well documented over the years. As happened with DR-DOS, Java, and Netscape, among other examples, Microsoft:
1. Allows their own product to stagnate for years.
2. Finally notices when another company starts to succeed with a new or improved technology.
3. Copies the new or improved technology (sometimes buys it, but often steals it, hence the lawsuits).
4. Fails to succeed with their often-second-rate copy.
5. Finally resorts to sabotaging the other company, through FUD, payoffs, polluting standards, and so on.
6. Gets a slap on the wrist from the courts. Pays a fine. Profit!
Microsoft's greatest innovation is their strategy for stealing technology. Microsoft always starts out by forming a partnership, or at least entering into negotiations with the other company, before stealing that company's technology. That way, the criminal courts never get involved, and no one at Microsoft ends up going to jail. Instead, the case always goes to civil court, where the worst Microsoft is likely to face is a fine. Microsoft is a master at manipulating the law.
I said that the evidence is frequently posted. Here is where you can read some of it:
The DOJ case against Microsoft - Findings of Fact [usdoj.gov]:
For example, this quote showing how Microsoft blackmailed Apple:
> Gates informed those Microsoft executives most closely involved in the negotiations with Apple that the discussions "have not been going well at all." One of the several reasons for this, Gates wrote, was that "Apple let us down on the browser by making Netscape the standard install." Gates then reported that he had already called Apple's CEO (who at the time was Gil Amelio) to ask "how we should announce the cancellation of Mac Office...."
Or these quotes from Microsoft's James Allchin:
> I don't understand how IE is going to win. The current path is simply to copy everything that Netscape does packaging and product wise. Let's [suppose] IE is as good as Navigator/Communicator. Who wins? The one with 80% market share.
> Pitting browser against browser is hard since Netscape has 80% marketshare and we have 20%.... I am convinced we have to use Windows -- this is the one thing they don't have.... We have to be competitive with features, but we need something more -- Windows integration. If you agree that Windows is a huge asset, then it follows quickly that we are not investing sufficiently in finding ways to tie IE and Windows together.
Also, read the parts about the ways Microsoft "encouraged" companies to break their contracts with Netscape, about how Microsoft threatened Intel to get them to stop working on Java, and so on.
Sun's lawsuit against Microsoft over Java [sun.com]:
This is a classic case of Microsoft attempting to copy/steal another company's product, then sabotaging that company's version of it.
For example, there is this memo about a meeting with Bill Gates:
> When I met with you last, you had a lot of pretty pointed questions about Java, so I want to make sure I understand your issues/concerns...
Re:Kooks (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Also (Score:3, Informative)
So they clearly used their OS monopoly (you needed your pen to work on windows) to feed their application group code to make at least a rough version of the same product. Definitely abusing their os monopoly to further extend their application monopoly. Those are the facts of the case I'm interested, not a message from Bill Gates, but the actions of many separate divisions in MS consipiring against a potential competitor.
Re:Geez (Score:3, Informative)
BS. MS made a point of breaking compatibility with OS/2 with successive releases of WIN32S.DLL, until they finally added a new call to allocate memory...that always allocated memory outside the 512 megabyte range that OS/2 DOS sessions permitted. The 512 megabyte limit was a sufficiently basic design decision that IBM gave up (though the limitation was gotten rid of late in Warp 4, long after it mattered). If you want RAM, does it matter to an application where it is? No. The sole purpose of the call was to make it extremely difficult to maintain compatibility.
Re:Is too (Score:3, Informative)
I had heard that this ruling was about to "expire." So we won't be able to call them a Monopoly anymore. We can still use "convicted monopolist" though probably...
I don't think that rulings ever expire. I.e. once one is a convicted felon, one is always a convicted felon. However, the important thing to bear in mind is that AT&T was also a convicted monopolist. I use the past tense there because it is hard to say that AT&T after the divestiture is still the same company it was before. Who is the convicted monopolist in that case? All the Baby Bells? Only AT&T just because they kept the name? Who? This is the problem when perpetual corporations reproduce by fission (like amoebas).
Microsoft is living under a consent decree which means that they are still limited in their activities due to being a convicted monopolist. AT&T lived under a consent decree for most of its corporate life (divestiture was largely a management decision to get out from under the consent decree). In fact remember that the concent decree prevented them (AT&T) pre-divestiture from selling UNIX licenses.
Antitrust law is a real pain for those convicted of it. It makes life really difficult (as it should). And I would not be surprised if, in 10 years, Microsoft divests in order to get out from under the scrutiny. If they are still dominant, of course (less likely than not).
Just for the record, antitrust law is not about penalizing success. It is about penalizing those who damage the marketplace and thereby harm the public as a means of either reaching or perpetuating success. The market economy is a public good, and not a matter of private ownership. To allow it to become privately owned would be to open up our system to what has been called by former US presidents a form of fascism in that the government could be effectively owned by a private party. The destruction of the market economy as a public good is incompatible with American capitalism and democracy. The market MUST remain free.
The original Go machine was way ahead (Score:3, Informative)
Go made two big mistakes. One was negotiating with Microsoft, and the other was partnering with AT&T. Back then, AT&T was trying to figure out what to do after deregulation. There was an AT&T PC (running UNIX, no less), AT&T minicomputers (running on 48VDC, just like telco gear), and for a brief period, AT&T retail computer stores. AT&T insisted that Go port their system over to some wierd AT&T CPU, which they did. Then they had some designer firm design a cool-looking but inconvenient case for the thing, with plastic plug-on modules on the side.
The prototype was better than the "production version".
It wasn't called "Go Computer, Inc"... (Score:4, Informative)
Search for either of those names or for "PenPoint" (the name of their first tablet and its OS) returns quite a few pages.
~Philly
Nope, you fail it. (Score:2, Informative)
A1. OS/2 supported the same Win32s that Windows 3.1's win32s package supported.
"Better" means in a faster, more stable, and more efficent manner - all of which OS/2 did. As for OS/2 being "more resource intensive" - it actually _used_ the 386 with pre-emptive multi-tasking - unlike windows, in which the entire computer was at the mercy of the currently running program to suspend itself.
C. You apparently didn't even bother a cursory google for the information. You are competely wrong, sorry. Digital Research even had a succesfull lawsuit against Microsoft for the intentional, anti-competitive flaws added to windows.
Re:happened to us too... (Score:3, Informative)
As to your sports metaphor, look to wrestling and boxing. The reason they have weight classes is because a 110# boxer would get beaten to a pulp by a 220# boxer, no matter how good he was. They are required to compete separately.
Re:Was MS even a monopoly then? (Score:2, Informative)
Remember back then how hard it was to buy a computer without a MS operating system? How manufactorers had to pay the MS tax even if they did include a non MS OS?
Don't know why you were modded up so high unless it is because a lot of people here are to young to remember how hard it was to aquire a computer without DOS or Windows back then.
MS has had a monopoly on PC OSes since damn near the beginning. I've even heard that MS set the price on the other available OSes back then. $50 for MS-DOS, $500 for CPM86 or USCD Pascal. Don't know whether it is true though.
I do know that IBM went way over board in making sure that they were not breaking their consent agreement with the DOJ and gave MS way to much control.