Bill Gates on Using Software Patents Against Interoperability (Comes vs. Microsoft - exhibit PX06508)
Roy Schestowitz
Hash: SHA1
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
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAkpDR80ACgkQU4xAY3RXLo6oPgCfZAljeIQ/tn3POBG7WY86kPNK
sGgAn0Hzm4+Wb+AFc2f4+Nn/O5iDqqy7
=j0rX
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
7
> 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.
> HIGHLY
> CONFIDENTIAL
Its highly confidential alright - it lets the world and dog know that
micoshat has NO intentions to allow interoperability across its
oriffice products. If you are a great company or a small company,
let micoshaft oriffice die I say. It serves no purpose in your company
if micoshaft its owners have no intention of allowing integration
and extending office functions if micoshaft isn't about sharing its
oriffice products and features. Don't ever again allow any new
micoshaft products in your company and replace everything with Open Office.