By Rachel Chalmers
Microsoft Corp has responded vigorously to the accusations against it in Caldera Inc’s Statement of Facts (CI No 3,650), a scathing indictment of Microsoft’s business practices in pitting its own MS-DOS against Digital Research Inc (DRI)’s DR-DOS. Microsoft’s riposte is a by-now-familiar litany of complaints, beginning with a dismissal of the Statement as a mishmash of out-of-context snippets and ending with a reaffirmation of Microsoft’s earnest desire to advance the evolution of personal computing, a desire that is constantly being thwarted by anti- consumer, anti-competitive enemies like Caldera.
Simply put, Microsoft bet on Windows, and many of Microsoft’s competitors failed to prepare to have products available to address a fundamental transformation of the PC industry, the company claims. Caldera is now trying to blame Microsoft for its own bad business decisions. That’s a bit of a stretch, since as Microsoft itself points out, Caldera didn’t exist at the time. The latter company inherited the DR-DOS battle when it bought the operating system from Novell Inc, which in turn absorbed the corpse of DRI.
Caldera alleges that back in the days of Novell and DRI, Microsoft deployed four anti-competitive tactics against DR-DOS. These were vaporware announcements, fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), exclusionary licenses and technological tying. Microsoft says its announcements weren’t vaporware, but were reflections of it’s own fast-evolving development schedules. As for FUD: pointing out the problems of a competitor’s product is a routine part of commercial life. Well, yes, but Caldera alleges that the problems Microsoft helpfully pointed out did not in fact exist.
Case in point: running Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS would throw up an alarming and mysterious error message. Microsoft says this was because Windows 3.1 had only been tested with MS-DOS: The notion was that Microsoft could warn consumers that they were using an untested configuration and that Microsoft could not guarantee the proper functioning of their machine. That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another. In 1988 Gates sent this email to his developer team: You never sent me a response on the question of what things an app would do that would make it run with MSDOS and not run with DR-DOS. Is there any version check or API they fail to have? Is ther [sic] feature that they have that might get in our way?
Lead developer Phil Barrett responded: The bottom line is… an application can identify DR-DOS. However most apps usually have no business making the calls that will let them decide which DOS (MS or DR) they are running on. In short, MS-DOS and DR-DOS were so similar technically that it was difficult to develop – let alone justify – a check that would detect the use of DR-DOS. Nevertheless, such a check was developed and implemented. Anyone attempting to install Windows 3.1 on DR-DOS would get an error message instructing the user to contact beta support.
Microsoft protests that the check was only ever used in a beta release, and that it received very few inquiries as a result of this message. What it doesn’t say is that it tried to convert those inquiries into sales. Caldera’s Statement quotes a Compuserve forum full of messages reporting the error. The Statement also includes one of Microsoft’s responses: Greg, you should be able to get rid of the message by using MS-DOS rather than DR-DOS.
As Brad Silverberg spelled out at the beginning of 1992, that’s exactly what the error message was for. What the guy is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS. To be fair, not everyone in Microsoft saw this as a delightful business practice. Rich Abel was a notable dissenter from the party line. I hate this whole thing, he wrote. I think it’s totally rude, reinforces the image that users have of use as the evil ones etc.
But Abel was a lone voice in the wilderness. Other Microsoft executives wanted to go much farther. It’s pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS-DOS or an OEM version of it, wrote David Cole in 1991. I checked with legal, and they are working up some text we are supposed to display if someone tries to setup or run Windows on an alien operating system. We are suppose [sic] to give the user the option of continuing after the warning. However, we should surely crash at some point later. This was the context for Barrett’s infamous evil laughter mail: Heh, heh, heh… My proposal is to have bambi refuse to run on this alien OS. Comments? The approach we will take is to detect DR 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like ‘Invalid device driver interface’…
That just leaves exclusionary licenses and technological tying. On the subject of licenses, Microsoft merely says that since a substantial portion of Microsoft’s licenses were not per processor, computer manufacturers clearly exercised all the options available. That language contrasts with Silverberg’s 1992 email: Look what Z-Nix is doing! Cut those f*****s off. As for tying, the company now says: Windows 95 is not built ‘on top of’ MS-DOS, but simply includes small amounts of code from MS- DOS… for purposes of maintaining backward compatibility. Yet Barrett in his deposition said: Under the hood there is DOS. It’s certainly worth taking Microsoft’s advice and looking at Caldera’s evidence in context. Doing so, however, just tends to make Microsoft look even worse.
