Comdex 97, more court battles and Appraising Microsoft

The Continuing Crisis

•Sunday night in Las Vegas, Microsoft co-founder and chief executive weenie Bill Gates opened Comdex 1997 with a keynote speech. Gates' speech consisted of the usual bovine excrement, a very, very badly written top-ten list, jabs at Java, defense of his business practices and typical "computers are the future" spew. He said that in the next two years computers will get into people's homes and wallets like never before, forgetting that his company has been getting into our wallets for years. Gates then had a Marine jump on a laptop to show how tough Microsoft products are, despite the fact that Microsoft doesn't actually make laptops (or any other hardware beyond overpriced input devices).

Following that sideshow, BillG showed some "normal" people using computers. Normal people like NBC News anchors, multi-millionaire retired basketball players and the guy that plays Newman on Seinfeld. Efforts to show off computer simplicity failed, as the retired multi-millionaire basketball player had difficulty using the mouse and kept calling his computer "the Interweb." Further attepts to show of the simplicity of computers were defeated when the beta of NT 5.0 Gates was using repeatedly crashed.

•To defend itself against charges that it broke a 1994 antitrust agreement with the US Justice Department, Microsoft is having to prove that the government knew it intended to incorporate a web browser with Windows back when the agreement was signed. To do that, Ms must convince investigators that it was planning an internet strategy as far back as spring 1994. That contradicts the story about how Ms and BillG ignored the internet until 1995 and then turned the whole company around in a month. Behemoth executives are hinting that their apparent ignorance about the internet until mid-1995 was just a show to make competitors (mainly Netscape) think the company had gone soft.

Another line of defense against the government is to take advantage of the agreement's loose definition of an operating system. It defines an operating system as "software used to control data on or hardware connected to a computer." Microsoft is now insisting that also includes data on "hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, tape backup drives or CD-ROM drives -- or remote -- such as servers on local and wide area networks." The only way to access some of that data, like web pages on a server in Zimbabwe, is through a web browser like IE4, thus making it a legal part of the OS. However, it'll likely take all 15,000 of their lawyers to make a judge see it that way.

Spyglass co-founder Tim Krauskopf, who is apparently satisifed with the money Microsoft gave his company for developing IE, echoed the monopoly's claim that including a web browser with the OS is a natural step in computer evolution. He claimed Spyglass decided never to sell its Mosaic browser because the company determined that it was an embedded technology and not a stand-alone product (a few years ago he said it was because they didn't think anybody would pay for it).

•Consumer activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader conveigned a conference of anti-Microsofties Thursday, who said that the monolith's eventual goal is to control the internet. Speakers included Nader, Sun CEO Scott McNealy, Ziff-Davis columnist John Dodge and attorney Gary Reback. The speeches and presentations highlighted Microsoft's business practices in the recent past, including how the monopoly has dumped below-cost software on the market to destroy competitors, used threats and intimidation to sell products and how they currently force computer OEMs to bundle Windows.

The only disturbance at the conference was outside - Two people wearing buttons saying "Ralph Nader doesn't speak for me" stood outside the conference room handing out announcements of a news conference by Microsofties in the same hotel. It was later discovered that both people (and many inside the news conference) were employees of PR firms Microsoft does use or has used in the past.

Microsoftie Bob Herbold (the inspirtation for Ms Bob™?) sent a four-page letter to the media, calling Ralph Nader's appraising Microsoft conference a "kangaroo court." Herbold questioned how Nader's nonprofit operation can afford to take out expensive, full-page national newspaper advertisements for the conference "on behalf of companies that compete with Microsoft." He also attacked the organization's $1000 entrance fee, but never made a connection between the two.

Nader issued a statement in response, noting that Gates and other Ms executives had been invited to speak and that they had turned down the invitations. He also said Microsoft had "mistakenly determined that its narrow mercantile interests are best served by denigrating -- and inaccurately at that -- a genuine effort to facilitate a debate over some of the central issues of our time."

Microsoft Stock Track

MSFT Stock Price^*139

Bill Gates' Worth$39.2 Billion

*As Of Closing, 11/25/97
Thanks to Bill Gates Personal Wealth Clock.

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