MS and the hay stack
Seems that MS is sued again. This time the important thing is that MS claims that 7 distinct people, erased the exact same e-mail messages from their personal computers and the servers over a period of 35 weeks (1 week previous till one month after meetings with the company Burst). These were the e-mails concerning their negotiations of intelectual property licensing with Burst. Seriously, this cannot happen. Simply too unlikely. Period. More can be found in Cringely’s article. Watch this quote:
_So the judge ordered Microsoft to produce the missing messages. The employee PCs, the servers, and the off-site backup tapes have to be searched and soon. The Microsoft lawyers complained that would be like finding a needle in a haystack. The judge reminded them that it was they who had put that needle in the hay._
Too good. Go judge, go! The article holds some other interesting information like keeping a lawyer at meetings to keep the information of that meeting out of the courts because its a priviledged client relationship all of the sudden. (Remember to cc the lawyer ;)).
The problem is that while MS might have banked on Burst.com to die, they didn’t.
_The only problem for Microsoft was Burst did not die. The company shrank to two employees, raised enough money to continue operating for two to three years, then found lawyers willing to take the case on contingency in exchange for a healthy chunk of any damage award. The lawyers are assuming all the financial risk, but they also have a chance to earn a payday worth hundreds of millions of dollars._
The Burst.com CEO was wondering if MS was just needing to win. Cringely adds:
_It isn’t that Microsoft needs so much to win, but that they are desperate not to lose. The company functions in part by encouraging paranoia. “Sure things look good now, but that could change in an instant.” That was Microsoft’s primary defense in its case with the Department of Justice — not that it didn’t have an effective monopoly, but that it had what it thought was a fragile monopoly. That’s why Microsoft needs a war chest of nearly $50 billion because that instant could come and the cash would be needed._
I have to admit that this is a particularly good article by Cringely. Check the end:
_E-mail is a world of distorted values where it is easy to go too far, and easier still to read things wrong and go even further._
Deep wording, maybe a bit over the top to sound cool but true none the less.
_I doubt that Bill Gates told anyone to destroy Burst.com, but I KNOW Bill Gates told the people of Microsoft that the company’s future lay in digital media and that cross-platform products were, by their very nature, a threat to Windows hegemony. It is only a short step then to erasing e-mails because doing anything less would be helping to kill Microsoft, not Burst. It’s them or us, right?_