Bill Gates: an ISV that writes to COR is just f*cked

Date: August 1997

Snippet
From: John Ludwig Sent: Thurdsay, August 21, 1997 9:03 AM To: Don Bradford Subject: conversations with billg last nite

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I was at the exec staff meeting last nite and there were 3 interesting exchanges with bill and the whole group about apple

1. bill's toop priority is for us to get the browser in october os release from apple. we should do whatever it takes to make this happen. if we get shut out, we should escalate to bill. you should make sure that we are engaging deeply with apple on this one and resolving any and all issues.

2. on the java work bill says the ball is in our court to come up with a win/win solution. he suspects that we should be cooperating only at the lowest level - native code interfaces, jits, etcx, not at the class lib level. bill was clear that his whole goal here is to keep apple and sun split. he doesn't care that much about being aligned with apple. he just wants tham split from other potential allies.

3. on xplatform class libs, we had an interesting and at times entertaining discussion. bill first asserted that we should be taking the entire COR infrastructure to all platforms. bobmu and i educated him about the expense of doing so - bobmu was pretty clear that there is no plan to take COR anywhere but windows. bill was initially shocked at this - he even said "so an isv that writes to COR is just fucked" this had us all roling on the floor at the irony here - bobmu said "we prefer to say taking full advantage of our platform bill" bill realized what he had said and agreed that most of COR should not be ported everywhere. ther was no clear conclusion to this discussion but overall i think ther was a sense that most of the work would be windows-centric and that we would not be working in general to take it all xplatform. the exception might be some limited dcom pieces for large vertical isvs who need unix solutions too.

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