Bill Gates’ emails, from lawsuits and leaks

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don't drive usability issues. Let me give you my experience from yesterday. I decided to download Moviemake and buy the Digital Plus pack r so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there. The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up This site is so slow it is unusable.

I think there is a very powerful deal of some kind we can do with Netscape. The basic framework is the following: - Clients make no money - Netscape is very influential on what happens with Clients - We want a number of things to become standard in the client - financial protocols, OLE, authentication to our directory... - There are a small number of things we dont want in the client - Opendoc

I believe as we evolve our security capabilities there must be some way to set this up so that our operating systems have shared secrets with each other that make them work better with each other than with other operating systems - whether it's JAVAOS layered on top of us or clones or anything else. I think we need to make this an explicit goal of our security strategy.

There has recently been an exchange on email with people in the Office group about Office and HTML. In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn't force Office users to use our browser. This is wrong and I wanted to correct this. Another suggestion in this mail was that we can't make our own unilateral extensions to HTML. I was going to say this was wrong and correct this also. However I think I better make sure that we have a consensus at the level of people on this email before I make this statement. My view is that in order to maintain a strong operating system position we have to enhance the Windows API and make Trident a fully integrated part of the story. It can't be Windows APIs versus Trident - they have to be complimentary although Trident will obsolete some Windows calls.

Some part of this debate relates to the issue of whether the browser is a logical extension of the operating system. When I explain to people what we are doing with help - moving away from a proprietary format with special tools to HTML and how that hleps users people start to understand. When I explain about bowsing information locally and remotely people understand. When I talk about letting ISVs call our html for LOCAL and remote display as well as link resolution etc... people start to understand. I also think we need to talk about our use of HTML for forms. Only by doing a document that EXPLAINS why we are putting the browser into the operating system will people start to have more sympathy for why this makes sense and understand that the government shouldn't be blocking this. Right now people think the ONLY reason we are putting the browser into the OS is to gain share which just is not true - we didn't get share from IE 1 in the OS or IE 2. IE 3 got us share before it was in the OS because it was a strong product. I think we need to do a piece on WHY we are putting the browser into the operating system and our future plans. I think we need to make that document widely known. I want to get Eric Schmidt in particular to comment on whether he thinks it makes sense or not. I wonder who really thinks browsers don't belong in the OS. Detrouzos of MIT told me how he had been saying this before Netscape was founded and even said so in some speeches.