Gates Sanctioned Poll For Senate Appearance

By DARRYL K. TAFT, Computer Reseller News

The government introduced more damaging e-mail evidence at the Microsoft antitrust trial Thursday afternoon.

This time the evidence dealt with a poll Microsoft sanctioned to support its claims that developers preferred to have Web-browsing technology integrated into the Windows operating system.

David Boies, the government's lead attorney in the case, introduced the e-mail to rebut a portion of the written direct testimony of Microsoft's first witness, Richard Schmalensee, dean of the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Boies asked Schmalensee whether the poll had more to do with giving Microsoft chairman Bill Gates a favorable position going into a Senate hearing last March. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) had invited Gates and several other leading computer and software-company executives to a Senate hearing on competition in the software industry on March 3 of last year. Schmalensee said he was not aware of a connection between the poll and the Senate hearing.

However, in a Feb. 14, 1998, e-mail written by Gates to some of the company's top executives and attorneys, the Microsoft CEO wrote: "I want to get a survey done where ISVs declare whether they think having the browser in the operating system the way we are planning to do it makes sense and is good. ... It would help me immensely to have a survey showing that 90 percent of developers believe that putting the browser into the OS makes sense. ... Ideally, we would have a survey like this done before I appear at the Senate on March 3rd."

Nathan Myhrvold, Microsoft's chief technology officer, and one of the recipients of Gates' e-mail, wrote back on Feb. 15, 1998, that "saying 'put the browser in the OS' is already a statement that is prejudicial to us. The name 'browser' suggests a separate thing. I would not phrase the survey, or other things only in terms of 'put the browser in the OS."

"Instead," Myhrvold continued, "you need to ask a more neutral question about how Internet technology needs to merge with local computing. I have been pretty successful in trying this on various journalists and industry people."

Mark Murray, a spokesman for Microsoft, said the company did have a third-party organization conduct such a survey, polling some 200 developers on their views. Murray also cited other parts of the Gates e-mail, one of which said, "We have never put crazy stuff into the OS and it's time for people to know we are doing this for developers and customers."

Gates' e-mail also suggested several well-known names in the industry that he hoped would sign on to Microsoft's plans, including Novell CEO Eric Schmidt, Intuit CEO Scott Cook, Symantec CEO Gordon Eubanks, industry pundit Esther Dyson, and others.

Microsoft executive Ann Redmond wrote an e-mail dated Feb. 23, 1998, which responded to the survey issue and its results. But Redmond said, "I wouldn't refer to it as unbiased, and wouldn't refer to it as an opinion poll." Redmond then gave some examples of unbiased approaches.

Ironically, Microsoft Thursday issued a press release announcing an independent poll showed that 73 percent of Americans believe Microsoft has benefited both U.S. consumers and the computer software industry.