To: Jon Shirly; Jeremy Butler; Dave Neir; Mike Maples; Steve Ballmer; Scott Oki
From: Bill Gates:
Date: October 31, 1998
Cc:Adrian King; Michael Cooper; Russ Werner; Jeff Raikes; Susam Boeschen; Pate Higgings; Jeff Harbers; Bob Gaskins; Tandy Trower; Peter Morse
RE: Australia Trip Report
Lots of interest in the NeXT machine, suprisingly little interest in the 1.1 ship date. On NeXT, I am now positive on its good aspects and merely note how difficuly it is to become mainstream.
..
Banyan is popular in Australia because of Comm software for the UNIX Server. Novell has a huge telecom deal that Daniel will look into to see if we can change (DISNET - 15,000 workstations!).
..
It's hard to keep a Mac lover happy with general future pitch, but I think I did pretty well .. My UNIX slide said UNIX was for government so I had to discuss MS DOS/POSIX/Zenith and explain what that meant. I position UNIX as important and growing because of its role in specialized workstations and replacing proprietary minicomputer OS'es. It helped to be positive on UNIX as part of the move to a few open OS'es which is the key to underlying trend. I talked about
confusion in UNIX being too bad but that it will take two-three years to resolve and we are neutral while selling the most AT&T UNIX.
I position it off the desktop because of binary issues - although that's not as strong an argument as I wouls like it to be ( something like CD-ROM would make it easy to compile for ten instruction sets or some 'setup' could actually compile)
..
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X-iowa: court documents in the case of Comes v. Microsoft.
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