Another gem from the Exhibits, this time Plaintiff’s Exhibit 2991:
—- quote —-
From: Bill Gates
Sent: Saturday, December 05, 1998 9:44 AM
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 your 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.
—- end quote —-
Again, what can one say?
Wonderful for the other shareholders that Bill was at his desk early on a Saturday? Wonderful that Bill was working so hard he did not have time to correct the lax style or typos (”destory”, or was that a poetic streak showing through)?
Or perhaps how gratifying it is that MS saw the light and started to behave as a model corporate citizen? After all, no one could possibly believe that such attitudes remain after all this time, could they?
Or how sad that Bill had learnt from Nixon’s experiences not to tape? It would have been interesting to hear the explanations “at greater length”.
Maybe someone more expert than me could fill in the details of the other dramatis personae?
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FYI,
The Proprietary IE extension BillG is talking about is VML. VML ships with IE5 since 1999, the WYSIWYG HTML days (that was the main feature of MS Office 2000).
The connection with OOXML is actually quite simple. Not only OOXML files migrated from older versions contain plenty of VML parts, even NEW OOXML files contain VML. This is illustrated with two examples here : http://www.openmalaysiablog.com/2007/06/is-vml-in-or-ou.html
This VML tax, barely specified in ECMA 376 specs (at best, you can say it is described, but that should not count the same for ISO reviewers), is pushed onto every developer.
And by the way, in ECMA 376, VML parts are referred to as “deprecate parts”. It’s an euphemism to say that ECMA 376 was never written to become normative…
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