“Deception in Big Tech”
I know it might seem a little strange to hear someone who works in the technology industry to talk about deception within the industry, but if you have ever visited my website, you will see that my slogan is, “Where technology meets integrity.” So this week is a little insight into the industry we have all grown not only to trust, but to rely on daily. You might wonder, when did the deception start and who started it. I’m not saying that I know for sure this is the first incident, and it certainly won’t be the last, but I found it interesting anyway.
It was 1991 and personal computers were just becoming mainstream. This was a point in computer history where one particular computer hardware architecture was clearly in the lead, and it is still one of the top companies today. Intel had made its way to the top of the hardware industry. This was partly due to a close relationship with Microsoft, one of the leaders in computer operating systems. Computers were still primarily text based systems; there were no real graphical interfaces like we use everyday and there were two main companies developing disk operating systems, Microsoft with their MS-DOS, and DR DOS by Digital Research, a company founded by Gary Kildall.
There was already a fairly heated relationship between Kildall and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. You see, Kildall had written CP/M, the very first operating system to turn a microprocessor into a usable computer almost two decades prior to Microsoft’s first attempt at a graphical computer interface. Microsoft Windows was still in the beta testing phase when DR DOS came on the scene. DR DOS provided all the same functionality of MS-DOS and used less memory, ran more efficiently and was 100% compatible with MS-DOS. This meant that people could run either MS-DOS or DR DOS and all the computer software of the day worked perfectly fine on both. DR DOS was also significantly less expensive than MS-DOS. This created a real problem for Microsoft.
Microsoft Windows was not a full operating system yet, like it is today; it relied on the underlying DOS operating system and surprisingly, it actually worked better on the competing DR DOS than it did on Microsoft’s own products. So how was Microsoft supposed to compete with this new Digital Research group? I’m sure from reading some other history on Gates that there was probably some offer to purchase the company, which was rejected, and then things got ugly.
You see, Windows was an excellent product that was set to vastly improve the user experience on computers, and pretty much everybody wanted it. Microsoft had the flagship product, but they worried that Digital Research was not that far behind them and needed to take the competitor under. This is where the deception started. Microsoft found a way to detect the subtle differences between DR DOS and MS-DOS and added a “bug” in the Windows beta test software that caused a failure if it was installed on DR DOS. They were trying to keep their core software monopoly from crumbling. Novell, a larger and older Microsoft competitor, saw the value behind DR DOS and purchased Digital Research in 1991. They poured massive funding into the DOS wars and Microsoft realized it could not win on merit alone, so it weaponized Windows.
What do I mean by weaponizing Windows? Basically they knew they could not win the war against Novell, as the DR DOS was clearly the better product, so they made certain Windows would not run on the competing operating system. They did this by creating what can be considered a false error message. When one attempted to install Windows on DR DOS, it displayed a dialog indicating that a “Non-fatal error detected: error #4D53 (Please contact Windows 3.1 beta support.) Press ENTER to continue.” It then stopped the install. When customers would reach out for support, Microsoft would tell them there was a compatibility problem with DR DOS and sticking with it would break their computer. This was a classic marketing move used by the computer industry known as “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.”
Their trick worked perfectly until April 1992, when a software analyst named Geoff Chappel looked under the hood of Windows and found code in reverse engineered Windows setup binaries that detected the competing DOS and disabled the system. A new company, Caldera, had taken over DR DOS from Novell and decided to go after Microsoft in court, proving the deception. It took several years before the knowledge became public, because Microsoft settled out of court for $280 million to buy the silence of Caldera and all those involved. It was more than a decade later, in November of 2009, that the settlement letters were made public, but by this time it was too late because Windows had become an industry standard and was now tightly integrated into MS-DOS, and there was no chance for separation.
Sadly the same type of deception continues in the industry today.
Until next week, stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is an Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to shamilton@techshepherd.org or through his website at https://www.techshepherd.org.
