Nathan Myhrvold: Internet strategy

Date: April 1995

Snippet
From: Nathan Myhrvold Sent: Monday, April 24, 1995 8:10 AM To: Bill Gates Subject: FW: Internet stratagy

FYI - feedback from Blackbird group on my email

Nathan

From: John Shewchuk To: nathanm; patfer; russs Subject: FW: Internet strategy Date: Thursday, April 20, 1995 7:50 AM

Very interesting memo - the Blackbird MSN/Internet.CorporateNet issue has been widely discussed on the Blackboard PM team for some time and there is a general consensus with the overall technical direction described here.

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if we wanted to move forward on this, in addition to the obvious issues that we have been thinking about such as moving Blackbird objects across TCP/IP networks, creating a server SDK and so on .. Blackbird uses HTML superset and is extending it with OLE, Forms3 and other Windows assets. It also includes security and billing.

ideally, the Blackbird front end would include a great Web browser and it would seamlessly integrate access to servers on the Internet: using a plain vanilla HTML/HTTP as well as Blackbird servers. This is our current stratagy, but tactically we are not there yet. Blackbird technology will not be generally available for a few months after MSN 1.0 ships.

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Given the current state of the internet and given our size and resource level, we are going to bootstrap our internet service by leapfrogging the current front end technology and distributing our own front end .. Over time (like within 3 months) we will be using more of the Internet infrastructure.

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- We will move to using TCP/IP, and thus will benefit from the ever cheaper connectivity which is a central part of the internet.

- We will allow access to any Internet service.

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/plex0_2281.pdf