Microsoft has a long history of licensing source code and then obliterating its supplier with an identical or improved product under their
Posted in General on 25. Aug, 2010
“Microsoft has a long history of licensing source code and then obliterating its supplier with an identical or improved product under their control.”Instead, Ferguson managed to engineer a sale to Microsoft. His description of his dealings with the company leaves you in no doubt of the leviathan that he was grappling with, nor of the hive-like unity of the thinking that dominated the company in the mid-1990s. When he finally sells the company, becoming a multimillionaire, there is a sense of having witnessed someone steer a car out of a fatal crash.Microsoft, knowing how much Ferguson hated it, imposed a gagging order on him lasting for two years after the sale. He couldn’t even opine on the company at dinner parties in case it “became public”. Ferguson began writing the book on the day after the gag expired.Events subsequent to the publication of Ken Auletta’s World War 3.0 suggest that Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson should have imposed a similar stipulation on Auletta – saying, for example, that he could not be quoted until the US Supreme Court had ruled on the Microsoft anti-trust case brought by the Department of Justice. Microsoft was dragged up before Judge Penfield Jackson by the department on charges of breaking the Sherman anti-trust laws He found it guilty.
Microsoft is appealing, and part of its grounds is the interviews in this book. Jackson gave them during the trial but stipulated that they could not be used until afterwards.The problem is that we all know what happened in the trial. Microsoft lost and now hopes that George Bush will throw the process into reverse. Auletta picks up interesting points showing that Microsoft’s lawyers played the wrong game, but if you cared about the case, you probably read it in the papers. Similarly, if you want to know about Bill Gates, you may find the interviews diverting, but other books tell the Microsoft story better.Like Microsoft, World War 3.0 is dull and thorough and has blotted out the light of more deserving products. Yet it does try to ask the difficult questions about what the real future threats to Microsoft’s hegemony will be.
It would certainly be a huge irony if the content of a book about a trial caused that trial’s result to be reversed in a higher court; but irony isn’t the key to a good read. And it can’t compete with Charles Ferguson’s breathtaking ability to be rude, accurate and concise at the same time – such as in his description of Apple Computer’s former chief executive John Sculley trying to take on Microsoft as “like watching a rich playboy who was ordering his yacht to attack a carrier battle group” Taking arms against a sea of troubles, indeed.. “It’s fantastic – I’ve just been told by the personal trainer that my pelvic floor shouldn’t be back to normal yet, as I’m still breastfeeding and producing hormones that make everything soft. I’ll be skipping out of here.” This information, on top of a few days of pampering at a hotel near Bath, had provided the finishing touch to one woman’s Maternal Bliss on a recent post-natal break.