Defeat: Bristol Forced to Sign Disputed Microsoft Contract >BY Siobhan Kennedy

Computergram International, August 10, 1999

Less than a month after losing its antitrust case against Microsoft Corp, Bristol Technology Corp has been forced to sign the very contract that it claimed would put an end to its business, ComputerWire has learned.

The contract, originally signed in 1994, was at the heart of the tiny Danbury software firm's case against Microsoft. Under the now famous WISE (Windows Interface Source Environment) agreement, Bristol gained full access to Windows NT source code, which it used to develop its flagship product, Wind/U. But when Microsoft drew up terms for the contract's renewal in 1997, it only offered Bristol a sub-set of the code, which the company claimed wasn't enough for it to continue to make Wind/U. After months of wrangling, it finally decided to sue the software giant in August 1998.

But now, with the jury having ruled in favor of Microsoft last month, Bristol has been forced to accept the terms of the contract it so rigorously fought to reject - or risk going out of business altogether. One of the reasons the jury may not have found Bristol's arguments convincing enough was that the company's main competitor, Mainsoft Corp, had already agreed to sign up to the same contract, claiming the new terms would have no effect on its business at all.

Bristol CEO, Keith Blackwell told ComputerWire that the company signed the agreement a week ago and would continue to develop its Wind/U product as best it could using the source code. Microsoft is expected to hand over the APIs within the next ten days, he said. Although the judge in the case hasn't yet officially entered the jury's verdict, Blackwell said he thought it was now unlikely that she would rule in favor of Bristol and give it full access to the APIs. The company initially announced plans to appeal, but it now seems as if that avenue has temporarily closed off, pending the judge's final verdict.

"It [the source code] allows us at least to maintain some support for the Windows API to our existing customers, although admittedly it will be restricted compared to what we had planned in the vision for our program," said Blackwell. But he added that only having partial access to the code would put an end for good to its proposed OEM deals, with the likes of SGI, Digital Equipment Corp (then being acquired by Compaq Computer Corp) and Siemens Nixdorf. "They're dead," he said of the deals, "when you start talking about only getting a subset, which is mainly geared to workstations not servers, and which will produce applications that will never be as good as the equivalent NT server apps, then there's no way they'll be interested."

Blackwell added that Bristol thought it important to accept the terms of the agreement in case it began to lose customers to Mainsoft, which he said had already begun a negative crusade of advertising against it. "We realized our customers wanted to stay with us, just that they were concerned we hadn't signed anything at all."

After the verdict was announced, Bristol was forced to cut 14 of its 60 US-based workforce, over half of which were developers, Blackwell said. "But considering the situation, people at Bristol are still quite hopeful," he added. The company still has three employees in Europe and ten in India. He said that Bristol has already managed to sign a number of new customers since the trial closed and it's also continuing development work on a new product aimed at IBM's MQ Series market. Blackwell, who says more details of the product will be released in a white paper today or later this week, said the product was designed to enable developers to write applications that would help companies track their MQ Series messaging environment.

The product, which will go into Beta release by the end of the year, will help alleviate some of the problems associated with tracking messages between different systems (mainframes, NT servers, Unix boxes) within an enterprise. "It will be a set of tools that developers can use to monitor the messages created by MQ Series," he said. "At the moment there are issues associated with some of those messages getting lost, or not ending up at the system they're supposed to be which makes the process difficult to track." He added that most companies have developed proprietary software applications to overcome those problems and that Bristol hopes to create a standard in that area.