Bill Gates: The "inetarnet" will destroy our power

Date: 1995

Snippet
From: Bill Gates To: Craig Mundle Cc: Nathan Myhrvold; Rick Rashid; Russell Siegeiman Subject: Internet Date: Monday, April 10, 1995 3:00 AM Message-Id: <9504101003.AA22722@irgmsm> X-Mailer Microsoft Mail V3.0 X-Ms-Attachment: WINMAIL.DAT 957 00-00-1980 00:00

Given that we are looking at the internet destroying our position as the setter of standards and APIs do you see things we should be doing to use ACT assets to avoid this?

I admit I find it hard to focus lost of resources on trials and things when the Inetarnet is taking away our power every day and will have eroded it irretrievably by the time broadband is pervasive on the course we are on right now.

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From: Rick Rashid To: Bill Gates; Craig Mundie Subject: RE: Internet Date: Tuesday, April 11. 1995 3:01 PM

OK- Here is a crazy idea (which frankly has nothing much to do with ACT but does address the question of Internet and standards):

As an example of Bill's point, Dan Ling showed me this morning that Satan (the new internet " daemon :-)) actually uses HTML as a user interface. Other software may begin to do this. It's easy. It produces a reasonable looking machine independent UI rather quickly. It's dangerous from our perspective of wanting to make and preserve valuable standards. There are plenty of other examples.

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So here's the idea: make Windows the standard interactive application interface for the Internet.

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/plex0_5704.pdf