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MS tries to hurt Palm? Naaah


Mon May 1, 2000 - 3:05 PM EDT - By James Hromadka

In all the hoopla that is the Microsoft anti-trust trial comes this tidbit from last week. According to the Justice Department, MS is using its monopoly power to hurt competitors in the PDA market.
From the REUTERS article:

Arguing that conduct remedies were insufficient to stop Microsoft's anti-competitive and unlawful conduct, the government said that on July 11, 1999, "Bill Gates wrote an e-mail directing that Microsoft redesign its software to harm competitors" who make personal digital appliances.

The department noted that this was less than 30 days after the company's 78-day trial ended, in which it was accused of using similar tactics against Netscape and others. Ultimately, the judge concluded such tactics violated the law.

"After discussing the Palm computing platform, Mr. Gates concluded in his e-mail," starts one tantalizing sentence -- and abruptly it ends. At that point, Gates' comments were censored.

Pretty surprising considering Palm is the company that has the bulk of the marketshare. The only thing that Microsoft could really do is remove the ability to sync with Palm-compatibles from various Microsoft products. Oh wait, they did that already.