<posted & mailed>
____/ Jerry McBride on Thursday 06 December 2007 00:35 : \____
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> Novell delays results amid SEC inquiry
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Shares of Novell Inc. fell Wednesday after the software maker postponed
>> | fourth-quarter results amid a federal inquiry into its accounting
>> | practices.
>> `----
>>
>>
>
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/novell-delays-results-amid-sec/story.aspx?guid=%7B611AD5A8-6FB6-4C79-9152-19528DCAFC7B%7D
>> http://tinyurl.com/34ch3e
>>
>> Novell postpones today's earnings release
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | While presenting the move as merely "an abundance of caution," Novell
>> | announced this morning that it is postponing its fourth-quarter earnings
>> | release and conference call that had been scheduled for today.
>> |
>> | It seems that Novell and federal regulators have been going back and
>> | forth for four months now over some unspecified issues.
>> `----
>>
>> http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/22677
>>
>> They foolishly looked for love in Microsoft.
>>
>>
>
> Dude!!!!!!! WHERE'S THE LOVE????!?!?!??!?!?!?!
>
> OHHHHHHH SHIT... DUDE!!!! WE'RE DONE FOR!>!>!>>!>>>>!>>>>....>!>>!>>!>!!!!!!
MSFT is up quite sharply today.
Scott M. Fulton, III to DoJ (5 years ago):
"How MICROSOFT LOST THE MORAL HIGH GROUND
In another civil matter separate from the suit brought forth by the
Justice Dept., the Canadian software producer Caldera took action
against Microsoft in U.S. District Court in Utah, on behalf of a
product it had acquired from Novell Corp.--a competitive operating
system called DR-DOS. (This civil action was later settled, and the
specific terms of that settlement were undisclosed.) As revealed by
evidence subpoenaed by Caldera and presented in its Consolidated
Statement of Facts, Microsoft's executives openly conspired to develop
MS-DOS in such a way that compliance with its principles would mean,
by definition, incompatibility with DR-DOS. Later, these same
executives came up with the idea of tying MS-DOS together with
Windows--the first instance of "tying" in the company's history--in
such a way that DR-DOS users would be artificially prohibited from
running Windows 3.1. In fact, as the evidence in Caldera v. Microsoft
indicates, Microsoft's idea of tying MS-DOS to Windows derived from
its efforts to thwart the development of DR-DOS, and may have been
created for that specific purpose alone and no other.
The Consolidated Statement in the Caldera case uses subpoenaed
internal documents and e-mails from Microsoft executives to draw a
picture of a company whose central, overriding, and only interest from
1990 to 1995 was not to produce a viable operating system for
consumers, but to prevent Digital Research, and then Novell, and then
Caldera from doing so. (Granted, IBM's OS/2 was also a Windows
competitor during this time, although the Caldera Statement makes
little mention of that system.) According to the Statement, in the
summer of 1990, Microsoft's OEM sales force was directed to only use
per-processor terms in licensing agreements with both small and large
PC manufacturers, in order to prevent, as one account manager put it,
"losing them to DR." Per-processor licensing practices was the subject
of one of the Justice Dept.'s first civil actions against Microsoft,
and was a matter of contention throughout the current civil case. Such
exclusionary licenses made it cost-prohibitive for manufacturers to
offer DR-DOS, or any other alternative operating system, to their
customers while at the same time maintaining their critical link to
Microsoft. As Microsoft's company memoranda--excerpted in the Caldera
Statement--indicate, the company was fully aware of that fact. For
instance, there is this note of congratulations: Congratulations are
in order for John "DRI Killer" McLaughlan (No, he isn't having another
baby) who signed a $2.5M agreement with Acbel (Sun Moon Star). The
agreement licenses DOS 5 per processor on a worldwide basis for 3
years (they will be replacing DRI DOS which they currently ship
outside the US).
In July 1991, Novell announced its merger with DR-DOS producer Digital
Research, in order to build a stronger, more complete operating system
product line that could compete on the same level as Microsoft, and
that could be licensed to IBM, which had already identified itself as
an interested party.
In a memorandum to fellow executives dated March 1992, Microsoft Vice
President (now Senior Vice President) Jim Allchin spelled out his
perception of the threat imposed by Novell: I still don't think we
take them as serious as is required of us to win. This isn't
IBM. These guys are really good; they have an installed base; they
have a channel; they have marketing power; they have good
products. AND they want our position. They want to control the APIs,
middleware, and as many desktops as they can in addition to the server
market they already own.
We need to start thinking about Novell as THE competitor to fight
against -- not in one area of our business, but all of them.
If you want to get serious about stopping Novell, we need to start
understanding this is war -- nothing less. That's how Novell views
it. We better wake up and get serious about them or they will
eventually find a way to hurt us badly.
Allchin's concept of "war" sparked then-Windows Product Manager Brad
Silverberg to advocate developing Windows 3.1 intentionally so that it
gave DR-DOS users the impression that it could not run on that
platform. The Caldera Statement provides this e-mail exchange between
Silverberg and his deputy (now Senior Vice President), David Cole:
Cole: A kind-gentle message in setup would probably not offend anyone
and probably won't get the press up in arms, but I don't think it
serves much of a warning [...] What is the guy supposed to do?
Silverberg: what the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and
when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is dr-dos and then go out
to buy ms-dos, or decide to not take the risk for the other machines
he has to buy for in the office.
With company policy having been determined that the Windows user
should be made to feel uncomfortable with the notion of using a
non-Microsoft product, work began on how to intentionally develop the
beta code of Windows 3.1 so that parts of it fail to execute on a
DR-DOS platform. In an e-mail discussion excerpted in the Caldera
statement, a developer of Windows 3.1 told his development manager,
Phil Barrett, of an incompatibility he discovered between a disk cache
utility for 3.1, code-named "Bambi," and DR-DOS. The developer reports
that he has created a build of the utility that solves this
problem. Nevertheless, Barrett suggests in his response that this fix
never see the light of day: heh, heh, heh ...
my proposal is to have bambi refuse to run on this alien OS. comments?
The approach we will take is to detect dr 6 and refuse to load. The
error message should be something like `Invalid device driver
interface.' The actual error message in Windows 3.1 Setup would read,
"The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You
must remove it before SETUP can successfully install Windows."
Whether on direct instruction to do so or working on his own
initiative, a Microsoft programmer made contact with Andrew Dyson, a
technical support analyst at DRI, and in so doing identified himself
as "Roger Sour, Director of Windows Development, Microsoft."
Explaining that he was trying to solve an incompatibility problem with
the "memory control blocks," this Microsoft developer requested
information from Dyson on whether DRI has written Windows code to
detect whether a program is running under a DR-DOS or MS-DOS
platform. In the interest of fair play, Dyson submitted this
information; but later, a DRI official wrote "Roger Sour" (whether or
not he knew Sour existed is beside the point) to tell him that DRI was
aware of Microsoft's plan to make Windows 3.1 fail on DR-DOS. The
letter stated, "Usually, when a software manufacturer feels that
something in our operating system is preventing their application from
running well, that company works with us to resolve the actual,
perceived, or potential conflicts." In a letter dated 1 November
1991, Phil Barrett responded to the DRI official that there no "Roger
Sour" at Microsoft, and added, "Perhaps you may have been the victim
of a prank." This "prank" was reported to the Federal Trade
Commission, which contacted Microsoft later that week. News of the FTC
contact prompted David Cole to write the following in an executive
memo: The bothersome part is where the hell is DRI getting their
information. Are they just speculating? Seems like a pretty risky
thing to do with the FTC? Did they interpret "Roger Sour" thing
broadly and conclude we are doing it for Windows?
What bothered Microsoft more than the possible appearance of
impropriety was the possibility of a mole within the company. For the
next year and a half, Microsoft would deal with DRI, Novell (which
acquired DRI), and the FTC as a single monkey on its back--the
collective entity preventing Microsoft from smoothly integrating
itself into the corporate computer network. Beginning in 1992,
Microsoft would develop the entire Windows platform into "Chicago"--a
confusing amalgamation of possible development scenarios which only
Microsoft would be able to decipher, leaving confused independent
developers and consumers to sort them out for themselves. In a 16 June
1992 strategy document circulated by Microsoft's then-Vice President
Brad Silverberg, the company outlined its concept of Chicago as a
product that could be packaged three ways--as Windows for Workgroups,
as plain Windows, and as MS-DOS. Thus, the answer to the question,
"Are you merging MS-DOS with Windows?" could be "Yes," and the answer
to the question, "Are you maintaining the two product lines
separately?" could also be "Yes." This obfuscation, according to
documents, was crafted deliberately for the sole reason of throwing
off the competition and keeping consumers guessing, thus fulfilling
the following directive Brad Silverberg had made in late 1991: This is
a very important point. We need to create the reputation for problems
and incompatibilities to undermine confidence to drdos6; so people
will make judgments against it without knowing details or fats [sic].
In 1993, following its acquisition of DRI, Novell re-engineered DR-DOS
to become Novell DOS 7--a product which it promised would not only
serve as a cohesive network and desktop platform, but which would also
run Windows 3.1 without problems. At long last, the monkey on
Microsoft's back became too much for Chairman Bill Gates, who on 21
July wrote the following memo to his subordinates: Who at Microsoft
gets up every morning thinking about how to compete with these guys in
the short term -- specifically cut their revenue. Perhaps we need more
focus on this...After their behavior in this FTC investigation, I am
very keen on this.
Once again, Gates infuses his fellow executives and product managers
with a lofty vision of Microsoft as having carte blanche, on account
of its size, to set the rules for the industry, even if it means
teetering on the edge of implying that it's above the law. With Gates,
there is never a smoking gun. The job of providing the smoke is left
to others, such as Jim Allchin who, in an 18 September 1993 memo,
advised the following: Sentiment is against us. We can and MUST turn
this around. As we become more aggressive against Novell product and
marketing-wise, we must get our mouth in order. The press, etc. is
very sketical of us so one slip up and we get set back quite a ways.
This really isn't that hard. If you're going to kill someone there
isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry -- you just
pull the trigger. Any discussions beforehand are a waste of time. We
need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger.
The strategy that Microsoft concocted is for the company to represent
Chicago as the successor to MS-DOS 6.3, and as perhaps Windows bundled
with DOS and perhaps Windows merged with DOS. Consumers and businesses
considering their upgrade options would have to consider the extent to
which they considered Windows an asset. Not knowing whether the two
products would bundle or merge, consumers were forced to evaluate
MS-DOS as though it were Windows, and not for its own merits--which,
against Novell DOS, were admittedly lacking. As long as Windows
continued to support Novell NetWare--and it did, quite
completely--consumers would conclude they had nothing to lose from
their current NetWare investment, if they were to choose an
all-Microsoft upgrade path for the future, which included DOS as
well. The decision to actually merge DOS with Windows was withheld
until the last possible minute--in 1994, well after what was supposed
to have been Chicago's initial release date. This decision was the
coup de grace to Novell DOS, indicating to buyers that there would be
no need for a DOS once Windows 95 was installed.
Consumer confusion about Microsoft's course of action led to the
desired result: Buyers turned away from Novell, believing what
Microsoft itself calls its own "FUD messages" (fear, uncertainty, and
doubt) about the future reliability of Novell DOS in tandem with
Windows. The term "FUD" is said to derive from a similar term used by
Pres. Nixon's famous "plumbers"--the people hired to spread rumors and
false information about possible presidential opponents. It is a term
which shows up in Microsoft internal memos and documents as though it
were its own brand name.
"
--
~~ Best of wishes
Roy S. Schestowitz | Citrix: device for turning XenSource into XenSoft
http://Schestowitz.com | Free as in Free Beer | PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
Cpu(s): 29.4%us, 4.7%sy, 1.0%ni, 61.4%id, 3.2%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
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