Bonum Certa Men Certa

Bill Gates: “We Should Look at Even Patenting the Things That We Do Add to Help Office”

Summary: Bill Gates wants not only to make IE 'extend' HTML but also to patent Office features that do so

For a little bit of essential background, see what was shown in:



Today we look at Exhibit PX06508 (1998) [PDF], which was probably made famous by the following text it contains:

From: Bill Gates Sent:. Saturday, December 05, 1998 12:4,t PM To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky Cc: Paul Maritz Subject: Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory Windows,

I would be glad to explain at greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.


It basically shows that Chairman Gates wanted to 'extend' the Web with proprietary Microsoft bits, but it actually gets worse. In the same exhibit we find intent to use software patents to limit interoperability/compatibility:

Its right for business reasons because it supports competitive browsers but with a clear benefit for people who use our browser (particularly IE 5),

What I trying to say is that looking forward we should not do heroic things like add new capabilities to the standards to help Office.

We should look at even patenting the things that we do add to help Office.

I need to lean more about this whole DAV thing.


The reply from Steve Sinofsky starts with an admission that Microsoft has proprietary protocols:



I personally think this is an area that has been oversold as a benefit and in terms of interoperability. In essence, this is a proprietary protocol for us anyway since we are re-building MAPI on top of It.



The words "open" and "standard" are thrown out there yet again:



For me, DAV is a case where Microsoft is out there leading with the newly proposed (by Microsoft) but yet to be implemented "open" standard. In contrast, HTML is a case where we are dealing with an installed base and standard that already existed and our conflicts are how to work within that environment.



Another interesting bit says that proprietary IE 'extensions' are "are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE."



For all practical purposes, Office 2000 requires Windows and IE. We started the project trying to be great on all browsers, and even greater on lnternet Explorer (from our vision and presentation we did for you), but the momentum inside the company essentially prevents that message from making it through development. Only the most basic rendering works in other browsers-IE is required for:

* PowerPoint (the default output is IE only, and that is essentially IE5) * Access Data Pages (IE5) * Web Components (IE5) * Reasonable performance in Excel (due to big tables and the IE5 support for a predefined table width) * Word and PowerPoint output tons of stuff that only looks good in IE due to the shared line layout code and bugs in other browsers implementation of CS(which is essentially an IE-specific feature) * HTML email essentially requires Outlook Express or Outlook * Vector Graphics (VML which renders using vectors rather than GIFs) requires IE

to name a few. I think these are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.


There is also clear realisation that people loathe this:

If Office documents only render in IE then there is zero chance that anyone will be able to use Office to create documents that will be shared outside an environment with the standardized Window browsers (intranet perhaps, but only perhaps given the time to migrate and the minority of Win 3.1, etc.). Personally I put pictures of a trip out on sinofsky.com that were made with PowerPoint 2000 and got a dozen messages from fdends and family (including a webtv person) saying they could not see the pictures. Everything I’ve posted here at the business school has been "recalled" by me because students were not able to read it (all sorts of combinations of OS/browsers).

No area of the product has received more skepticism and push back than our HTML output-from reviewers, analysts, and beta customers. The other night I attended a 500 person Office 2000 event in Boston (the Team Web Tour"). The whole presentation was in IE and every time the browser was shown hands went up to ask "what about non-IE browsers?". Finally the demonstration showed powerpoint 2000 in IE which is *awesome* output--then showed the non-IE output and it was just ugly (didn’t scale, fixed size slides, no slide show view, no DHTML, etc.). I thought the audience was either going to get up and walk out in disgust or rush the stage in protest.


All in all, what any person can learn from this 9-year-old antitrust exhibit is that orders come from the very top to add proprietary extensions to Internet Explorer and shield them even further with software patents. Microsoft knows that people would not like this, but being anti-competitive, this may seem like a priority. Had it been just about improvement, then patents would probably not be needed and the issue of breaking interoperability remains.

For people whose work is affected by the ODF/OOXML situation it is an important lesson to always bear in mind.




Appendix: Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit PX06508, as text










Plaintiff's Exhibit 6508 Comes V. Microsoft

From: Steven Sinofsky Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 4:39 PM To: Bill Gates; Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan Cc: Paul Maritz Subject: RE: Office rendering

Office does not love DAV. In fact we, I, didn’t want to support it at all, but the Exchange team delivered our abstraction layer (the derivative of OLEDB that works against FrontPage). It was not something we needed, and several times pushed back since it made the FrontPage case we cared most about more complex and inefficient. I personally think this is an area that has been oversold as a benefit and in terms of interoperability. In essence, this is a proprietary protocol for us anyway since we are re-building MAPI on top of It. Nevertheless, Office 2000 will be able to save/load against FTP, FrontPage, SMB, and the Exohange/IIS DAV server. But DAV servers (to the extent they really exist) do not support any of the richness we have with FrontPage 2000’s server extensions such as link fix up, checkin/checkout, page themes, site statistics, etc.

For me, DAV is a case where Microsoft is out there leading with the newly proposed (by Microsoft) but yet to be implemented "open" standard. In contrast, HTML is a case where we are dealing with an installed base and standard that already existed and our conflicts are how to work within that environment.

For all practical purposes, Office 2000 requires Windows and IE. We started the project trying to be great on all browsers, and even greater on lnternet Explorer (from our vision and presentation we did for you), but the momentum inside the company essentially prevents that message from making it through development. Only the most basic rendering works in other browsers-IE is required for:

* PowerPoint (the default output is IE only, and that is essentially IE5) * Access Data Pages (IE5) * Web Components (IE5) * Reasonable performance in Excel (due to big tables and the IE5 support for a predefined table width) * Word and PowerPoint output tons of stuff that only looks good in IE due to the shared line layout code and bugs in other browsers implementation of CS(which is essentially an IE-specific feature) * HTML email essentially requires Outlook Express or Outlook * Vector Graphics (VML which renders using vectors rather than GIFs) requires IE

to name a few. I think these are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.

I totally understand where you’re coming from, but in trying to decide what to do it isn’t that black and white for me based on the experiences i’ve had personally with people. We have talked about this a lot and I really do need your help. If Office documents can only be rendered in it is a complete non-starter with customers. This is not a religious issue, but just a practical one.

If Office documents only render in IE then there is zero chance that anyone will be able to use Office to create documents that will be shared outside an environment with the standardized Window browsers (intranet perhaps, but only perhaps given the time to migrate and the minority of Win 3.1, etc.). Personally I put pictures of a trip out on sinofsky.com that were made with PowerPoint 2000 and got a dozen messages from fdends and family (including a webtv person) saying they could not see the pictures. Everything I’ve posted here at the business school has been "recalled" by me because students were not able to read it (all sorts of combinations of OS/browsers).

No area of the product has received more skepticism and push back than our HTML output-from reviewers, analysts, and beta customers. The other night I attended a 500 person Office 2000 event in Boston (the Team Web Tour"). The whole presentation was in IE and every time the browser was shown hands went up to ask "what about non-IE browsers?". Finally the demonstration showed powerpoint 2000 in IE which is *awesome* output--then showed the non-IE output and it was just ugly (didn’t scale, fixed size slides, no slide show view, no DHTML, etc.). I thought the audience was either going to get up and walk out in disgust or rush the stage in protest.

Again, I really understand the business issues and strategic issues. I think we’re just faced with the reality that if we require IE for rendering as an explicit choice (that is when you load a page it just says ’You’re not running IE") then we are just saying that Office’s HTML is a demo feature and not for practical use. If we didn’t have HTML support in Office 2000.

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

MS/CR 0017808 CONFIDENTIAL

then I’m still convinced we would have been working on a release that customers would have viewed as utterly irrelevant--creating web documents is what people need/want to do: with Office or without Office. That’s the catch-22 I feel we’re in. Unless things change a lot, my feeling is that an upgrade to Office 2000 is already in jeapardy with customers that do not use IE and any higher level of requirements will drive our upgrade changes way down.

I think this knob will continue to turn even more towards IE over time as Windows/IE continues to achieve success. I suspect that each release of Office will continue to require more and more of IE. But in order to even be in the consideration set we will have to have some amount of downlevel support that customers will tolerate if they want to exchange information in a professional manner.

-----Original Message-----

From: Bill Gates Sent:. Saturday, December 05, 1998 12:4,t PM To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky Cc: Paul Maritz Subject: Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory Windows,

I would be glad to explain at greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

MS/CR 0017809 CONFIDENTIAL

From: Bill Gates Sent:. Saturday, December 05, 1998 5:09 PM To: Steven Sinofsky; Bob Muglia; Jon DeVaan Cc: Paul Maritz; Eric Rudder Subject: Office rendering

I think the current support we have is just right for both technical and business reasons. Its right for technical reasons because the team worked hard to support old browsers as much as they could.

Its right for business reasons because it supports competitive browsers but with a clear benefit for people who use our browser (particularly IE 5),

What I trying to say is that looking forward we should not do heroic things like add new capabilities to the standards to help Office.

We should look at even patenting the things that we do add to help Office.

I need to lean more about this whole DAV thing.

-----Original Message----- From: Steven Sinofsky Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 4:39 PM To: Bill Gates; Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan Cc: Paul Maritz Subject: RE: Office rendering

Office does not love DAV. In fact we, I, didn’t want to support it at all, but the Exchange team delivered our abstraction layer (the derivative of OLEDB that works against FrontPage). It was not something we needed, and several times pushed back since it made the FrontPage case we cared most about more complex and inefficient. I personally think this is an area that has been oversold as a benefit and in terms of interoperability. In essence, this is a proprietary protocol for us anyway since we are re-building MAPI on top of it. Nevertheless, Office 2000 will be able to save/load against FTP, FrontPage, SMB, and the Exchange/IIS DAV server. But DAV servers (to the extent they really exist) do not support any of the richness we have with FrontPage 2000’s server extensions such as link fix up, checkin/checkout, page themes, site statistics, etc.

For me, DAV is a case where Microsoft is out there leading with the newly proposed (by Microsoft) but yet to be implemented "open" standard. In contrast, HTML is a case where we are dealing with an installed base and standard that already existed and our conflicts are how to work within that environment.

For all practical purposes, Office 2000 requires Windows and IE. We started the project trying to be great on all browsers, and even greater on Internet Explorer (from our vision and presentation we did for you), but the momentum inside the company essentially prevents that message from making it through development. Only the most basic rendering works in other browsers-IE is required for:

* PowerPoint (the default output is IE onty, and that is essentially IE5) * Access Data Pages (IE5) * Web Components (IE5) * Reasonable performance in Excel (due to big tables and the IE5 support for a predefined table width) * Word and PowerPoint output tons of stuff that only looks good in IE due to the shared line layout code and bugs in other browsers implementation of CSS (which is essentially an IE-specific feature) * HTML email essentially requires Outlook Express or Outlook * Vector Graphics (VML which renders using vectors rather than GIFs) requires IE

to name a few. I think these are enough to convince people that Office requires IE in a proprietary way and that if you want to exchange documents, the odds are your recipients won’t be happy with anything but IE.

On top of that, we have dozens of features in the product that require IE4 and many that require IE5 - this is in order for them to run at document creation time.

I totally understand where you’re coming from, but in trying to decide what to do it isn't that black and white for me based on the experiences I've had personally with people. We have talked about this a lot and I really do need your

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

MS/CR 0017810 CONFIDENTIAL

help. If Office documents can only be rendered in it is a complete non-starter with customers. This is not a religious issue, but just a practical one.

If Office documents only render in IE then there is zero chance that anyone will be able to use Office to create documents that will be shared outside an environment with the standardized Window browsers (intranet perhaps, but only perhaps given the time to migrate and the minority of Win 3.1, etc.) Personally I put pictures of a trip out on sinofsky.com that were made with PowerPoint 2000 and got a dozen messages from friends and family (including a webtv person) saying they could not see the pictures. Everything I’ve posted here at the business school has been "recalled" by me because students were not able to read it (all sorts of combinations of OS/browsers),

No area of the product has received more skepticism and push back than our HTML output--from reviewers, analysts, and beta customers. The other night I attended a 500 person Office 2000 event in Boston (the "Team Web Tour"). The whole presentation was in IE and every time the browser was shown hands went up to ask "what about non-lE browsers?". Finally the demonstration showed powerpoint 2000 in IE which is *awesome* output-then showed the non-IE output and it was just ugly (didn’t scale, fixed size slides, no slide show view, no DHTML, etc.). I thought the audience was either going to get up and walk out in disgust or rush the stage in protest.

Again, I really understand the business issues and strategic issues. I think we’re just faced with the reality that if we require IE for rendering as an explicit choice (that is when you load a page it just says "You’re not running IE") then we are just saying that Office’s HTML is a demo feature and not for practical use. If we didn’t have HTML support in Office 2000, then I’m still convinced we would have been working on a release that customers would have viewed as utterly irrelevant-creating web documents is what people need/want to do: with Office or without Office. That’s the catch-22 I feel we’re in. Unless things change a lot, my feeling is that an upgrade to Office 2000 is already in jeapordy with customers that do not use IE and any higher level of requirements will drive our upgrade changes way down.

I think this knob will continue to turn ever more towards IE over time as Windows/lE continues to achieve success. I suspect that each release of Office will continue to require more and more of IE. But in order to even be in the consideration set we will have to have some amount of downlevel support that customers will tolerate if they want to exchange information in a professional manner.

-----Original Message----- From: Bill Gates Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 12:44 PM To: Bob Muglia (Exchange); Jon DeVaan; Steven Sinofsky Cc: Paul Maritz Subject: Office rendering

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company.

We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities.

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destory Windows.

I would be glad to explain at greater length.

Likewise this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well.

HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL

MS/CR 0017811 CONFIDENTIAL



Credit: wallclimber

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Even Microsoft (MSN) Covers Richard Stallman's Public Talk in Milan 2 Days Ago
He spoke in Spanish earlier this month (Alicante)
Very High Attendance Level at Richard Stallman's Talk Shows People Can Relate to His Message
Smear campaigns have their limits
 
Links 28/05/2025: 'Emulation Layers' (Measurements and Linguistics), Libraries, and Discomfort
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: More Arrests for Bitcoin-Connected Torture and Prosecutions for Dieselgate-Linked Executives
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Techo-authoritarianism With Slop Plagiarism and "No Online June" (Going Offline)
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: GitHub MCP Exploited and MathWorks Discovers Huge Windows TCO
Links for the day
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Celsius-Fahrenheit, Endless Scrolling/Infinite Scrolling, and Trapping LLM Slop Bots
Links for the day
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
More Photos From This Week's Milan Talk by Richard Stallman
The posts are in Italian, not English
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 27, 2025
Links 27/05/2025: Science Defunded, India Arrests an Academic
Links for the day
Gemini Links 27/05/2025: From Celsius to Fahrenheit and Deleting Social Control Media
Links for the day
Microsofters Have, in Effect, Attempted Extrajudicial Action Against Us
Courts and Judges (or Masters) don't exist to facilitate this kind of "bro" culture
UK High Court Masters Are Not Your Jesters, Microsoft
Judges aren't there for "funny" spectacles, they're there to act as arbiters in critical cases, not SLAPPs
Links 27/05/2025: Mass Layoffs at Volvo and More Evidence of 'AI' (Slop) Being a Passing Fad
Links for the day
The Code of Conduct (CoC) Gaslighting Phenomenon
There are still many people and projects foolish enough to outsource their labour to Microsoft via GitHub
They're Very Jealous of Richard Stallman and His Freedom (or Simple Lifestyle)
Jealousy is toxic because it can cause rational people to act irrationally and even severely harm themselves
Akira Urushibata on GNU coreutils
new message
Anouk Rozestraten (Deputy Director) Appears to Have Left the Free Software Foundation
Let's hope Rozestraten is still using and promoting Free software
There's Nothing Funny About Lawbreaking
There's plenty of room in society for humour, but "hacking" the state by breaking laws isn't cool or hip
More Mass Layoffs Coming Soon to Microsoft, Just a Question of When and How Many
Numbers from Washington were close to 5% and judging by prior rumours, it would be 5% + 5% (total 10%) at a later month
Links 27/05/2025: Bikes, Ideal Computers, and BYO
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, May 26, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, May 26, 2025
Richard Stallman's Milan Talk (Public Presentation) Was Packed, Video Available Soon
Looks like they even ran out of seats
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: Intangible Stuff and Slop Issues
Links for the day
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part I: Complaints to IRS or USDOJ Needed
If enough people do it, this will be more effective, more so if people who are based in the US do it
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Lobbying and the OSI's Status at Stake
At the end we plan to summarise all the issues in one very long article
Breaking Into Other People's Devices Without Authorisation Isn't "Funny" or "Research"
“Chaos was the law of nature; order was the dream of man.”
The Issue Isn't the Internet, the Issue is How People Are Taught to Use or Misuse It
The Web is circling down the drain. The Internet is not.
A Healed Reputation of a Movement's Leader and His Robust Message
The more aggressively you push against resistors, the more credibility they will gain
Links 26/05/2025: Deletions from Microsoft's GitHub, Telegram Blocked in Vietnam
Links for the day
Linux Released Last Night and There's Already LLM Slop With Slop Images
BetaNoise does not seem to mind this anymore
Links 26/05/2025: Walmart Layoffs and DRM Dumpster Fire ('Old' Fire TV Devices Lose Netflix Access)
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/05/2025: USB Camera Viewer and Fantasy Life
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, May 25, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, May 25, 2025