Bill Gates: don't underestimate an OPEN Internet

Date: April 1995

Snippet
From: billg Sent: Thursday, April 06, 1995 2:55 PM To: craigmu; nathanm; paulma; peteh; russs Cc: brianf Subject: Internet as a business tool

I know I am a broken record on this but I think our plans continue to underestimate the importance of an OPEN unified approach for the internet.

The demo I saw today when Windows 95 was showing its Internet capability was someone calling up the Fedex page on the internet and typing in a package number and getting the status.

Imagine how much work it would have been for Fedex to call us up and get that running on MSN and negociate with us. Instead they just set it up. A very simple way to reach out to their customers.

The continued enhancement of the browser standards is amazing to me. Now its security and 3d and tables - what will it within the next several years? Intelligent controls, directory - everything we are trying to define as standards.

..

The analogy here is that the major sin that Microsoft made with Netware was to let Novell offer a better (actually smaller & faster, with simpler protocol) client for networking. This got to critical mass and can now evolve both client and server together. Hence we had and still have a really hard time displacing Novell at the server.

In fact I am still of the opinion that we will not really deliver a really telling blow against Netware until we make some significant user-visible, client-side feature that Novell would have trouble matching in their servers. One of the reasons why I remain such a fanatic OFS believer.

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/plex0_2273.pdf