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Microsoft, Standards, and Incompatibility: 1991-2010 -- And a Novell Smoking Gun

By Pamela Jones et al.

Another gruesome exhibit is now finished as text in our collection of Comes v. Microsoft exhibits, Exhibit 1116 [PDF].

It's a Microsoft memo from 1991, regarding a suggested attack plan to beat out IBM's OS/2, written by Joseph Krawczak, currently group program manager for Outlook at Microsoft. Here are just three damning sentences from the confidential memo:

Pursue a product development strategy that prevents IBM from claiming Windows compatibility. Prevent Windows applications from running correctly on OS/2....

Reposition OS/2 as impractical and incompatible in the minds of customers.

Nice. First quietly create incompatibilities to make sure that Microsoft applications wouldn't run right on OS/2. Then tell the world that they shouldn't buy OS/2 because Microsoft applications wouldn't run right on OS/2.

But 1991 is a long time ago, I hear some of you say, and there is a new Microsoft. Oh? Let's see if that's so by highlighting one of the recent Novell filings with the SEC, its work agreement with Microsoft titled "Improving Microsoft-Novell Interoperability through Open XML" and dated March of this very year.

It's regarding work Microsoft was willing to pay Novell to do to make Microsoft's cynically misnamed Open XML seem like it allows interoperability. Novell has been at work since March to make Novell's version of OpenOffice.org interoperate, sort of, but as you will see not completely with Microsoft Office 2010 so that it would at least look like Open XML works and that somebody is implementing it.

What a role for Novell to agree to play. We've had our suspicions for years, since Microsoft and Novell entered into its patent peace agreement and technical work agreement, and now we know that everything we suspected Novell was doing with its version of OpenOffice.org, it was. It is. This is the smoking gun. And the work agreement runs through November of 2011, so this story isn't over yet.

Full post as published by Groklaw on December 20, 2010 (boomark / email).