2002 retrospective: Microsoft changes its spots

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 7 Jan 2003 at 10:47

As the new year begins, we look back on Microsoft's ups and downs in 2002

2002 saw some huge changes for the company. The four-year antitrust case is pretty much all but wound up (although lawsuits from Sun and Netscape are still on the horizon), it introduced sweeping new changes to its corporate licensing programs and has taken a long hard look at itself with regard to its positioning for the future.

January
Even this early on we had clues as to what was to come. Bill Gates' opening keynote at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) spoke of repositioning the traditional desktop PC as a media server, with the screens through which you interact being touch-sensitive and everything being wirelessly and ubiquitously connected. In the months to come we would soon see Tablet PCs, a new enthusiasm from Microsoft for wireless networking and a Media Edition of Windows XP.

Also this month saw a turn in the fate of the Microsoft antitrust case. Microsoft had asked for more time to prepare its evidence to defend itself against nine outstanding states that had rejected the proposed November settlement. The states refused. The case had already been drawn out to nearly four years and Microsoft's own financials for the quarter just passed revealed quite how much lawyers' fees were denting its income - to the tune of $660m.

We also heard the first noises of Trustworthy Computing in one of the company's very public emails. Gates wrote to his employees, telling them to 'choose security' when deciding on features for new products. Yet the month hadn't closed when it was revealed that upgrading systems to XP Pro would overwrite instances of Internet Explorer 6.0 with a fresh unpatched version, complete with all the security holes of the original.

February
The first of the month saw Scott Charney, from Pricewaterhouse Coopers' Cybercrime Prevention and Response Practice, appointed as Chief Security Strategist to lead Microsoft's security efforts.

But the main agenda for February was its .Net technologies. In particular, the launch of Visual Studio.NET offered developers the toolkit with which to build the Web services envisioned as being made possible using the technologies.

The antitrust case rolled on, with further complainants queuing up for a pop at the behemoth, and Kollar-Kotelly, the presiding judge, ordering Microsoft to reveal its source code to lawyers for the nine states seeking stiffer penalties, who were trying to show how a bare-bones version of Windows could be produced.

March
March opened with the nine outstanding states rejecting amendments Microsoft had made to the November settlement in a bid to curry favour for the deal. They all ended up back in court within the month to battle out whether the November settlement went far enough to prevent the company using its monopolising practices in emerging markets.

Kollar-Kotelly delayed the case further when she announced she had no idea what they were banging on about and would need 'more factual information' about these other markets.

Separately, the EU took an interest in Microsoft's positioning in the server market, investigating the company for antitrust practices.

There was good news for Microsoft, however. Deutsche Telecom - T-mobile to you and me - decided .Net was the road to choose in delivering Web services to mobile platforms. Microsoft also made the source code for its implementation of C# and the .NET CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) available as shared source (that is, it put restrictions on how it can be used).