Key to the Justice Department’s anti-trust case against Microsoft Corp are some quotes from internal company documents from top executives, now doing the rounds over the internet. The following are a sample. On March 1, 1996, Brad Chase wrote: We should move the sign-up Wizard into the boot-up sequence somewhere … this way we can increase the likelihood that an end user gets the option to sign up for solutions that promote IE before they get into the desktop or any customized shell that features other browser solutions. On July 24 1996, Bill Gates wrote in an email: I was quite frank with him (Scott Cook, CEO of Intuit Inc) that if he had a favor we could do for him that would cost us something like $1m to do that in return for switching browsers in the next few months I would be open to doing that. And on February 24 1997, Microsoft’s Christian Wildfeuer wrote: It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase market share on the merits of Internet Explorer 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the Operating System asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator. Last week, following the Department of Justice decision, Gates told journalists that the documents were extracts out of context.
