Text 16203, 84 rader
Skriven 2007-02-17 07:19:36 av mike (1:379/45)
Ärende: Microsoft dirty tricks that were never revealed
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From: mike <mike@barkto.com>


http://www.technologyevangelist.com/2007/02/microsoft_dirty_tric_1.html

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Microsoft settled today its anti-trust case with the people of Iowa, which may
well be the last anti-trust case against the world’s largest software company,
at least in this cycle.  Iowa was all that remained of the original 18 states
and the District of Columbia that sued Redmond several years ago.

Now that the case is settled I’d like to write a little bit about something
that happened in an earlier case – Burst v. Microsoft – but was never revealed.
 I kept expecting it to be revealed in this case, but apparently it was not.

I’ve written before about Burst v. Microsoft, but the short story here is that
Burst lawyers caught a pattern of apparent destruction of e-mail evidence on
the part of Microsoft.  Microsoft claimed it was “too hardö to search for the
lost e-mails (Burst had copies from its side so many of the messages were known
to exist) but the judge finally ordered Microsoft to do whatever it took to dig
up the tapes and find the e-mails.  Fortunately for Redmond, the case settled
(for $60 million) before Microsoft actually had to produce anything.

Now, as they say, for the rest of the story…..

Months after the Microsoft/Burst settlement I received e-mail from a former
Microsoft contractor:


“Now that Burst v. MS has moved out of the courts, I thought that I might add a
little to what you know about this case. Back about two years ago when the
judge told MS to cough up the rest of the emails that was supposed to have
floated around between MS execs that discussed the Burst relationship, the team
that I was on (Corporate tape backups) was asked to gather all together all of
the tapes that were used during that time. Even though there was a corporate
policy in place that any *.pst was to be excluded from backup capture, the
effort failed. Not only did the Backup Exec software fail to filter out those
pst files, but some of the involved blue badges (Microsoft employees)
intentionally disguised their mail files so that they would not be recognized
and included in the nightly backups. This last effort was even prohibited by
policy from the VP level. As I was the one tasked to gather the tapes together
from Arcus/Iron Mountain, I know exactly how many tapes were recalled for the
involved servers. They filled several 240 tape trunks and were stored in the
Building 11 tape vault.ö

“Several months after all of the tapes were gathered, MS legal started asking
for restores of any pst files captured, the tapes “mysteriouslyö went missing.
Now because our team was a managed service vendor, we were held directly
accountable and responsible for the loss. I can think of a lot of reasons that
the tapes were removed by someone blue. It is also possible that someone on our
team performing a  standard purge of old media mistakenly pulled them and sent
them to the shredder and even though the tapes were stored in a special section
specifically marked “Do Not Touchö taped across them I find it highly
unlikely.ö

This is Bob, back again.  In case you aren’t familiar with this case let me put
this guy’s statement in some context.  Microsoft was saying that it couldn’t
find the tapes and that it would take millions of man-hours to search for them
when in fact the several trunks full of tapes were apparently easily gathered
and already stored in the Building 11 tape vault.

At the time Microsoft lawyers were claiming the tapes would be impossible to
find, THEY HAD ALREADY BEEN FOUND.

It would be interesting to know if Microsoft’s lawyers were aware of this. 
They should have been, but this may have been one of those instances when it
was to their advantage NOT to know.

And then THE TAPES DISAPPEARED.  Funny we never heard about that, either.
“ö
To my knowledge, Microsoft never presented this "the dog ate our tapes" story,
most likely because they didn't want to acknowledge that there even WERE such
tapes.  The fact that there were tapes and then there weren't SHOULD have been
mentioned, since I'm guessing not doing so violated a court order.  Certainly
it should have at least been mentioned in the discovery materials given to
Burst.

But wait, there’s even more to this story.  Stay tuned……
===

 /m

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