Here's another relevant exhibit,
Exhibit 2151 [PDF] from the collection of exhibits in the
Comes v. Microsoft case, an email from Bill Gates, the subject was "Shell plans - iShellBrowser", dated October 3, 1994, to Bill Bass, Bob Muglia et al. In connection with iShellBrowswer, Gates writes:
I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for the likes of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage. This means that Capone and Marvel can still live in the top level of the Explorer namespace, but will run separately. We can continue to use the iShellBrowser APIs for MS provided views such as control panel, and can use them for other MS-provided views that don't create a large compatibility or ISV issue....
Having the Office team really think through the information intensive scenarios, and be a demanding client of systems is absolutely critical to our future success. We can't compete with Lotus and Wordperfect/Novell without this. Our goal is to have Office '96 sell better because of the shell integration work, and to have the Ren/Office effort yield technology that can be an integral part of the shell in Windows '97.
There you are. X marks the spot.
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