Did Microsoft Try to Bulldoze Apple?

2. Apple

104. QuickTime is Apple’s software architecture for creating, editing, publishing, and playing back multimedia content (e.g., audio, video, graphics, and 3-D graphics). Apple has created versions of QuickTime to run on both the Mac OS and Windows, enabling developers using the authoring software to create multimedia content that will run on QuickTime implementations for both operating systems.

     
     

     QuickTime competes with Microsoft’s own multimedia technologies, including Microsoft’s multimedia APIs (called “DirectX”) and its media player. Because QuickTime is cross-platform middleware, Microsoft perceives it as a potential threat to the applications barrier to entry.

     
     

105. Beginning in the spring of 1997 and continuing into the summer of 1998, Microsoft tried to persuade Apple to stop producing a Windows 95 version of its multimedia playback software, which presented developers of multimedia content with alternatives to Microsoft’s multimedia APIs.

     
     

     If Apple acceded to the proposal, Microsoft executives said, Microsoft would not enter the authoring business and would instead assist Apple in developing and selling tools for developers writing multimedia content.

     
     

     Just as Netscape would have been free, had it accepted Microsoft’s proposal, to market a browser shell that would run on top of Microsoft’s Internet technologies, Apple would have been permitted, without hindrance, to market a media player that would run on top of DirectX.

     
     

     But, like the browser shell that Microsoft contemplated as acceptable for Netscape to develop, Apple’s QuickTime shell would not have exposed platform-level APIs to developers.

     
     

     Microsoft executives acknowledged to Apple their doubts that a firm could make a successful business out of marketing such a shell. Apple might find it profitable, though, to continue developing multimedia software for the Mac OS, and that, the executives from Microsoft assured Apple, would not be objectionable.

     
     

     As was the case with the Internet technologies it was prepared to tolerate from Netscape, Microsoft felt secure in the conviction that developers would not be drawn in large numbers to write for non- Microsoft APIs exposed by platforms whose installed bases were inconsequential in comparison with that of Windows.

     
     

106. In their discussions with Apple, Microsoft’s representatives made it clear that, if Apple continued to market multimedia playback software for Windows 95 that presented a platform for content development, then Microsoft would enter the authoring business to ensure that those writing multimedia content for Windows 95 concentrated on Microsoft’s APIs instead of Apple’s.

     
     

     The Microsoft representatives further stated that, if Microsoft was compelled to develop and market authoring tools in competition with Apple, the technologies provided in those tools might very well be inconsistent with those provided by Apple’s tools.

     
     

     Finally, the Microsoft executives warned, Microsoft would invest whatever resources were necessary to ensure that developers used its tools; its investment would not be constrained by the fact that authoring software generated only modest revenue.

107. If Microsoft implemented technologies in its tools that were different from those implemented in Apple’s tools, then multimedia content developed with Microsoft’s tools would not run properly on Apple’s media player, and content developed with Apple’s tools would not run properly on Microsoft’s media player.

     
     

     If, as it implied it was willing to do, Microsoft then bundled its media player with Windows and used a variety of tactics to limit the distribution of Apple’s media player for Windows, it could succeed in extinguishing developer support for Apple’s multimedia technologies.

     
     

     Indeed, as the Court discusses in Section VI of these findings, Microsoft had begun, in 1996, to use just such a strategy against Sun’s implementation of the Java technologies.

     
     

108. The discussions over multimedia playback software culminated in a meeting between executives from Microsoft and Apple executives, including Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, at Apple’s headquarters on June 15, 1998. Microsoft’s objective at the meeting was to secure Apple’s commitment to abandon the development of multimedia playback software for Windows.

     
     

     At the meeting, one of the Microsoft executives, Eric Engstrom, said that he hoped the two companies could agree on a single configuration of software to play multimedia content on Windows.

     
     

     He added, significantly, that any unified multimedia playback software for Windows would have to be based on DirectX. If Apple would agree to make DirectX the standard, Microsoft would be willing to do several things that Apple might find beneficial.

     
     

     First, Microsoft would adopt Apple’s “.MOV” as the universal file format for multimedia playback on Windows. Second, Microsoft would configure the Windows Media Player to display the QuickTime logo during the playback of “.MOV” files.

     
     

     Third, Microsoft would include support in DirectX for QuickTime APIs used to author multimedia content, and Microsoft would give Apple appropriate credit for the APIs in Microsoft’s Software Developer Kit.

     
     

109. Jobs reserved comment during the meeting with the Microsoft representatives, but he explicitly rejected Microsoft’s proposal a few weeks later. Had Apple accepted Microsoft’s proposal, Microsoft would have succeeded in limiting substantially the cross-platform development of multimedia content.

     
     

     In addition, Apple’s future success in marketing authoring tools for Windows 95 would have become dependent on Microsoft’s ongoing cooperation, for those tools would have relied on the DirectX technologies under Microsoft’s control.

     
     

110. Apple’s surrender of the multimedia playback business might have helped users in the short term by resolving existing incompatibilities in the arena of multimedia software. In the long run, however, the departure of an experienced, innovative competitor would not have tended to benefit users of multimedia content.

     
     

     At any rate, the primary motivation behind Microsoft’s proposal to Apple was not the resolution of incompatibilities that frustrated consumers and stymied content development. Rather, Microsoft’s motivation was its desire to limit as much as possible the development of multimedia content that would run cross-platform.

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This court case Civil Action No. 98-1232 (TPJ) retrieved on 2-06-2023, from justice.gov is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction.