"The purpose of announcing early like this is to freeze the market at the OEM and ISV level. In this respect it is JUST like the original Windows announcement...

"One might worry that this will help Sun because we will just have vaporware, that people will stop buying 486 machines, that we will have endorsed RISC but not delivered... So, Scott, do you really think you can fight that avalanche?"

--Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft

THIS MAY be very minor, but the following exhibit, Exhibit px07724 from Comes vs Microsoft [PDF], is about the mythical MS-DOS 7, which much like Windows 7, is intended to be released Real Soon Now™ (after Windows 95). Was it ever released? Well, either way, it was intended to keep Novell at bay. ⬆

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Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit px07724, as text

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Depo. Ex. 965

Unknown From: Richard Freedman Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 1994 9:31 PM To: Personal Systems Group Marketing Team Subject: FW: MS-DOS 7?

here is my standard answer on "where is ms-dos 7?"

the bottom line is that if customers want ms-dos 7, we’ll do it, and we’ll ship it a few months after chicago.

if we do an ms-dos 7, it will be chicago without the gui. but it would be a somewhat strange product, and we’re not sure who the market would be for it, chicago has complete backwards compatibility with ms-dos apps. it runs them faster and more reliably than windows 3.1, and even has a special mode for particularly Ill-behaved ms-dos apps. chicago has very modest hardware requirements - 4mb 386 is iL and e lot of functionality in chicago is in the gui, and taking out the gui will mean much less functionality and that is something most customers won’t like. chicago even has a C> that combines the best of CUI and GUl that ms-dos users will die for.

but if customers insist on ms-dos 7, we’ll build it. [never leave an opening for novell or ibm.] thanks.

From: Brent Ethington To: Richard Freedman Cc: Richard Barton Subject: MS-DOS 7? Date: Tuesday, April 05, 1994 5:09PM

Was asked about this in each of my Chicago overview talks at TechEd. I said that product packaging decisions had not been finalized, but never said that we were’nt doing one, nor did I say we were.

What’s the word on this? RichBa suggested you send a piece of mail to the PSG team clarifying what we should say when asked this question.

brent

MS-PCA 1182370 CONFIDENTIAL

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

Page 2 MSC 00045171

Plaintiff’s Exhibit 7724 Comes V. Microsoft

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