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Microsoft hits back at Burst.com allegations | |
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| Time: 09:08 EST/14:08 GMT | News Source: ZDNet UK | Posted By: Robert Stein | ||
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Microsoft has denied it used stolen intellectual property to build Media Player 9 and has called Burst.com's account of last week's trial on the matter "inaccurate" and "groundless". Microsoft was ordered by a US judge last week to produce thousands of emails as part of an investigation into whether the software giant stole intellectual property from Burst.com and used it in Media Player 9. | ||
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| #1 By 3339 (66.219.95.6) at 9/4/2003 1:57:27 PM |
| Which ads? Maybe you should dump IE and never go back... |
| #2 By 3339 (66.219.95.6) at 9/4/2003 2:08:27 PM |
|
From Cringely:
"When Burst's lawyers put the messages in order by date and time, they claim to have noticed a peculiar phenomenon. There were literally no messages from approximately one week before until about a month after all seven meetings between the two companies. This meant that either Microsoft completely suspended its corporate e-mail culture for an aggregate period of 35 weeks, or there were messages that had been sent and received at Microsoft, but not divulged to Burst. Presented with this charge in court, Microsoft's attorneys acknowledged that the message gaps existed. The messages had been erased by the half-dozen Microsoft employees involved, both from their PCs and from the mail servers. There were no backup copies. The reason for this mass erasure, it was explained, is that Burst technology was unimpressive and not of interest to Microsoft, and the e-mails were simply not worth keeping. As a longtime Microsoft watcher, I have to jump in at this point and wonder why, if the technology was of no interest, Microsoft took seven meetings over two years to decide this? The en masse nature of this erasure is also interesting because every involved Microsoft employee choosing to erase exactly the same messages over seven perfectly identical time periods seems hardly coincidental. Why didn't they erase all messages relating to Burst, not just the 35 weeks? And it would be interesting to know if messages concerning every little company that negotiated unsuccessfully with Microsoft were also erased on such a schedule. There must be dozens or hundreds of such companies. That would be an interesting thing to know." vs. Desler's: "Desler expressed surprise at Burst’s account of the court hearing: "Their fundamental premise -- that there were missing emails from a specific period of time -- is simply wrong." Instead, he said, the companies "discussed a routine discovery issue arising from the fact that not every email sent or received gets saved". According to Desler, the judge "simply directed us to do a more thorough search of our backup files to search for any emails that, as a matter of business routine, were not saved elsewhere." Discovery phase requests email from a specified period, and you don't assemble the materials from backup (apparently, they are finding some of them now) but rather from other sources? Isn't backup the better source of materials from over a two year span? Just some questions. This post was edited by sodajerk on Thursday, September 04, 2003 at 14:10. |
| #3 By 3653 (63.162.177.143) at 9/4/2003 2:22:38 PM |
| little, little man... |
| #4 By 135 (208.186.90.91) at 9/4/2003 6:50:51 PM |
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I'm surprised Microsoft is still saving any emails.
Automatic purge of anything over a week old I say! |
| #5 By 1845 (12.209.152.69) at 9/4/2003 8:40:17 PM |
| It's a good thing they saved emails and were forced to turn them over to the public, otherwise we'd never have had David Bank's book Breaking Windows: How Bill Gates Fumbled the Future of Microsoft. That taught me more about what I think Microsoft really is, since I was reading the execs' own words, than anything Paul, Mary-Jo, CNet, ZDNet, Inq, or Reg put together have taught me. |
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