Confidential Microsoft Emails Posted Online

dos4who writes "From the class action 'Comes et al. v. Microsoft' suit, some very enlightening internal Microsoft emails are now made public. Emails to and from Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, Jim Allchin, etc all make for some mind blowing reading. One of my favorites is from Jim Allchin to Bill Gates, entitled 'losing our way,' in which Allchin states 'I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft.'"

Coral Cache

[Baldrson]

Here is the coral cache of the documents. [nyud.net]

"losing our way" was referring to WinFS

[jonadab]

That's what happened to WinFS: Jim Allchin killed it, or talked someone into killing it. If you read that "losing our way" email carefully, that's what he's talking about. LH means Longhorn, i.e., what they were calling Vista at the time (early 2004). "We need a simple fast storage system" in this context means "We need to ditch WinFS".

The "scenario" stuff is probably related to this topic also, but I don't know enough about the culture inside of Microsoft to say how.

Re:Non-PDF?

[Anonymous Coward]

The PDFs are just embedded images scanned from printouts of the emails (your tax dollars at work in the court system). Google OCR is your friend. [google.com]

Unless you don't "allow google in your biz" either? Microsoft search may have something similar but I've not yet seen the email where they say they're going to copy the google feature.

Microsoft brand FUD

[DaveM753]

I love this:

From exhibit PX 851, a memo from bradsi to billg and steveb (among others) regarding alleged "bugs" in DR DOS as found by Microsoft commissioned NSTL:

"We are engaged in a FUD campaign to let the press know about some of the bugs. We'll provide info a few bugs at a time to stretch it out."

Ahhhh...Microsoft(r) Time-Released FUD(tm). Gotta love it. :-)

Re:Non-PDF?

[DogDude]

The reader is beyond crap. Last I checked, the reader was a 60+ meg install, and it's such a pig that PDF's take MINUTES to open on some of our machines, if the perpetually updating/crap installing reader doesn't hang trying to do an update. I shouldn't need a work around for a simple text file. It's absurd. That, and the file format itself is so bloated that it makes MS Word files look trim by comparison.
It's simply unacceptable. It's bad software. It's a bad file format. We won't use it. It's that simple. If more people refused to accept bad software, I think that we'd have less bad software floating around out there.

Re:broken legal system

[tomhudson]

It was originally attorneys-only.

Subsequent litigation .... different case .... documents admitted into evidence .... court ruled they can be made public in this instance.

Its the same as the original AT&T / BSD agreement. It *was* secret, but the world has changed, its no longer secret ...

What a bunch of Wing Nuts.

[twitter]

Not even the rhetoric from a "Women's study" class can prepare the reader for the contents of those letters. All the diabolical "power" talk is like a script from a bad movie. Start anywhere and you get there fast. They really are sick.

The first thing I looked at had this nonsense: [iowaconsumercase.org]

To gain power, IBM's got to take it away from Microsoft, and our power starts with DOS. ... We are engaged in a FUD campaign to let the press know about some of the [DR-DOS] bugs.

You might recall later evidence from the Novel DR-DOS lawsuit, where Microsoft later killed DR-DOS off by making Win3.1 not work with it and then blaming DR-DOS in BBS postings. Nice.

The next thing seems to indicate witness tampering [iowaconsumercase.org] in the same power struggle.

The next random look [iowaconsumercase.org] has more opinion manipulation trough astroturf:

User story placement - developing and placing MS-DOS related stories in key publications, both trade and vertical, to communicate that corporations have a large investment in MS-DOS and will continue to trust in it. Develop user profiles?

And it goes on and on. The targets today are the ones that survived, IBM, Novel, and friends but now include the free software that everyone but M$ has agreed to use because it's better. Instead of fudding BBS, they are here and in the newspapers and TV networks they purchased for the purpose. If these dorks spent half the time wasted on improving their product, they might have a product that works. Instead, they have focused on marketing, "power" and other crap that's ended in DRM [slashdot.org] and botnet hell. No one should trust M$ for anything and everything they touch is suspect.

Re:broken legal system

[MindStalker]

Your probably a troll, but if not. The plaintifs got the judges permission to post these exibits. http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article ?AID=/20070108/BUSINESS/70108029/1029 [desmoinesregister.com]

No leaks at all.

Re:Non-PDF?

[DaveM753]

Many courts across the country require PDF format for exhibits. That way, exhibits can be retrieved from court websites and emailed to and fro by counsel and court.

Re:Non-PDF?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's definatly not what DHTML and css are for. They are meant to be able to display content on a wide variety of devices, adapting the display of the content to better fit it. Completly different beast. People to try to make their websites look exactly the same on all platforms are comepletly missing the point and going to need a lot of headacke medecine.

Re:They are the one's laughing....

[teknopurge]

Oh, and another thing:

I can compile java bytecode to run faster then optimized C++ apps. [kano.net]

It's been this way for years. [idiom.com]


Please hurry with that patch! Also, it would be nice if you updated your script from VB4!!!! ;)

Re:But corporations are people too!

[tomhudson]

The "right to privacy" doesn't extend to evidence admitted in open court.

This is necessary to uphold the integrity of the courts. Otherwise, people won't know the basis on which a finding of guilt or innocence was made, leading to all sorts of accusations of favoritism and backroom deals, bribes, etc.

Re:Uhm, Whatever, Jim

[jjohnson]

It's not that he wants a Mac, it's that, if he weren't an interested party in the success of Microsoft (and you can imagine the publicity that would result from a photo of Jim Allchin opening a PowerBook), and he were choosing between Mac and an XP based notebook, he'd take the Mac. It's an evocative way of saying "right now, Mac is better than what we're offering."

Re:2001

[uhlume]

2001? Try 1998 [wikipedia.org].

Re:Groklaw coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this: http://web.archive.org/web/20041205152641/www.appl e.com/ilife/video/ilife04_320.html [archive.org]

Embarrassing stuff.

Re:One of my favorites

[Mydron]

It's sort of silly to say that the fact that the guy is PM makes him sort of super authority. . . . hell, there are PM interns

You have product [microsoft.com] and program [microsoft.com] manager confused.

From the links:
A program manager "[l]eads the technical side of a product development team, managing and defining the functional specifications and defining how the product will work." These PMs are, as you intimate, a dime a dozen at microsoft.

A product manager "[f]ormulates business and marketing strategy." These PMs have a lot of authority and make decisions at a much higher level.

Just compare the description of a product manager [microsoft.com] compared to that of a program manager [microsoft.com].

There are a 110 product manager job openings at MSFT compared to 365 program manager openings.

BullSh*t

[shis-ka-bob]

This statement is so confused. The Constitution grants individuals all rights not specifically enumerated (Ninth Amendment). So we have the right to use the privy (how our Founding Fathers used 'privacy' - a 'moment of privacy' was time to use the outhouse). We also have the right to have children, eat, sleep, drink and so forth. None of these are specifically enumerated and not of these are applicable to a corporation.

Giving corporations HUMAN rights is completely messed up. They should enjoy the same rights as any group of people, but they should never be given human rights. Microsoft is allowed to have internal documents that it can protect. But when these documents are demanded by a court, the court can allow the documents to be made public. The judge has allowed Roxanne Connlin to release all of these documents on the website. Microsoft has petitioned to keep some documents out of the public domain, and these documents are not on the site.

Curiously, this is the first time that Bill Gates testimony to the DOJ is viewable by the public. This case is shining a great deal of light on Microsoft business practices.

Re:Non-PDF?

[lastchance_000]

Link directly to the source [thedailywtf.com]

Re:the death of Xbox 360 and what that means.

[bonch]

Even if it were, nobody gives a shit. The PS2 was way less powerful than either Gamecube or Xbox, and everyone bought it anyway, because it was cheaper and first to market.

The PS2 wasn't cheaper. It won because it was an affordable DVD player, and it played all the PS1 games. The Gamecube was more powerful and cheaper but couldn't overcome its limited games lineup (the 360 seems to be having this problem with all its U.S.-centric first-person shooters). The XBox, despite lots of Halo-driven media hype toward the end of its life, tied with Nintendo at 15% marketshare.

Microsoft wants gamers to abandon the PC as a gaming platform and go to the 360.

Not at all, or they wouldn't have started their "Games for Windows" program and introduced DirectX 10 in Vista.

All Microsoft cares about is getting people dependent on the Windows platform, be it on your PC or on your game console (XBox and XBox 360 both run Windows and DirectX). The 360 to me is just more of the same, while the Wii is offering something new. If I want a multimedia powerhouse, I'll go with the PS3 once it drops in price. I also don't like the idea of having to pay Microsoft just to be able to play online games. That's crap to me.

Re:One of my favorites

[julesh]

That's BS. Program Managers are usually technical and Product Managers are marketing folks. They work on different things. A Product Manager takes the product when it's done positions it on the market.

That's BS. For example, Jim Allchin is the Windows Product Manager. He had pretty much the final say over what features were and weren't included in Vista during its development.

Re:One of my favorites

[dabraun]

Jim Allchin is (was) a President of Microsoft, not a Product Manager. He drove Vista to completion - which is something no one with the title of Product Manager would have the power to do. GP is right about what a "product manager" really is. GMs and PUMs are the people who own overall products and the final decisions about them.