Email with Bill
Monday, February 27, 1995 by Dave Winer.
Good morning!
I was tempted to get in the middle of the Microsoft/Apple fracas over video software, but decided to stay out.
If I had gotten involved, I might have have said that everything Apple says Microsoft has done, Apple has done itself.
I could have concluded by saying what goes around comes around; both parties to an ugly situation get to learn the lessons. It may take time, as they say, but eventually it happens.
Glad I stayed out of that one!
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I got into a round of email with Bill Gates over my "Hole in Microsoft's Online Strategy" piece, released on 2/23/95. With a light edit, here's the exchange. Some interesting ideas came out.
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Date: February 23, 1995
From: billg@microsoft.com
To: dwiner@well.com
Maybe this is just trying to deal with the facts but I don't understand the claim here that the Macintosh is more open.
There is great Windows support from Compuserve, AOL, Prodigy and every online service I can think of. There is a commitment from each of the companies here to continue to improve their Windows support. All of these companies have had Windows95 for over a year in order to do their development work. Microsoft has been supporting every one of these companies in their efforts.
On Windows machines these companies get their front ends shipped with machines by working with manufacturers. Prodigy's front end shipped on over half the machines being sold. AOL's front end ships on a number of machines.
I think the Macintosh is a great machine with a bright future but it will have to be fueled on more than pure rhetoric.
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Date: February 23, 1995
From: dwiner@well.com
My point was in the title of the message. I keep waiting to get mail from a MS person saying I'm wrong, here's the Mac client, go download it.
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Date: February 23, 1995
From: billg@microsoft.com
To: dwiner@well.com
We do have work going on with a Mac client. We hope to be more timely on our Mac client than E-world was on their Windows client. However it will not be available at first ship. The MSN group has a lot of exciting things they are doing - it's a real challenge getting a new style online service going. We are pleased with the way the whole online industry seems to have been galvanized by our plans or people's imagination about our plans.
I still don't know what the lack of a Mac client has to do with openness. Are ISVs who only ship their software on Windows now considered closed? This word open gets a lot of interesting definitions nowadays. I always think of it in terms of customer choices - under Windows the customer gets to choose their hardware supplier. Under Mac and Windows customers have a wide choice of software products.
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Date: February 23, 1995
From: dwiner@well.com
I think there are more opportunities for online companies using the Mac platform as the client than Win95. My opinion. Not stated as fact. I could be wrong.
What I said -- Mac is becoming more open and Windows more closed.
More open in the sense that there are more choices for customers. Exactly as you defined it. Talk to the Radius guys. Open also has to do with the tilt of the table. It's not an absolute thing, there are degrees of openness. Certainly Win95 would be a more open client platform if MSN were not bundled.
As I've learned from my own experiences with Apple, customer perceptions count too. Are Windows users that much more sophisticated than Mac users? How will you avoid letting them conclude that somehow MSN is the "official" network for Windows users? I bet you don't discourage them from drawing that conclusion. When journalists start using the adjective "standard" to describe your service, will you call them up and protest? There's a community out there, and you're using them. I didn't say there was anything unethical or illegal going on. But I don't have to ignore the phenomenon, just because, apparently, you want me to.
I guess it's ironic that if Apple had been better at executing on eWorld, we'd be hearing a lot about that bundling thing too. I don't suspect you'll hear too much bitching if MSN ends up having the same level of presence as eWorld does.
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Date: February 23, 1995
From: billg@microsoft.com
To: dwiner@well.com
As you say in your mail we may or may not be successful with MSN. It will depend on whether we do an incredible job at low prices for customers. If we do a good job and customers choose to buy it it seems like a good thing for Windows users to me. Meanwhile all the other online companies will continue to do a great job on Windows. All of them are choosing to put more energy into Windows than any other platform and that will result in lots of good choices for Windows users.
As you have pointed out in the world of the Internet no one "owns" an online customer. MSN will be just one place on the Internet - some people will dial it direct and gateway to the Internet. Some people will come in from the Internet to MSN. We are enabling Windows for the Internet with Windows95 - because we think thats great for customers.
MSN is not bundled with Windows95 - the client bits are there and can optionally be installed. PC manufacturers already bundle lots of front ends. I said earlier that Prodigy was on well over a majority of PCs sold this Christmas. Did Apple let Prodigy do the same things that PC manufacturers did? Giving away front ends to any online service is a trivial thing - just post them on the Internet and get them on the CDs which will be inserted in virtually every PC magazine within the next few years.
The last I looked Apple had not given up on E-world. They got into the market before us and I am sure they have learned a lot and will do even better in the future. It's hard to say we are ahead of them or better than them when we haven't even shipped anything yet.
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Thanks Bill! A very interesting discussion... I learned a lot.
Dave
PS: In the same piece, I said "Creative energy will flow to the open platform. Creative people haven't migrated to Windows." Please let me clarify that statement. By creative people, I meant art directors and copy writers, as in the creative people at ad agencies. Content people. I certainly didn't mean to imply that as a whole, Windows users aren't creative. Quite the opposite. You have to be very creative to derive meaning from 8-character file names! (Sorry...)