Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Good Shit.

From VF's oral history of the Internet:

Gary Reback: A group of Microsoft executives came down to Netscape and had a meeting, and the Microsoft people in effect said that if you’re going to make a browser that can serve as a platform for new applications it’s going to be all-out war with us. But if you want to do something smaller, that just hooks in with our stuff, we’ll give you the non-Microsoft part of the market to work with. And we’ll sort of draw a line, and you’ll have part of the market and we’ll have part of the market.

Thomas Reardon:
The government’s argument that we went down there Mafia-style, telling Netscape that they have to do a deal with us or they were going to find a dead-horse head in their bed in the morning—it was kind of absurd. It turns out Marc was sitting in the meeting, taking notes on his laptop. They had contacted this famous anti-trust lawyer, Gary Reback. They had been working with him. They kept asking us these really loaded and weird questions. We thought we were down there for a business meeting, technology meeting, engineering meeting. And then they ended up taking all the minutes of that meeting, you know, and sending it out to this anti-trust attorney, who then turned it over to the D.O.J. that night. It was just a bunch of bullshit.

No comments: