This article is more than 1 year old

SCO ‘forced out of desktop market’, deposition reveals

Identified as OS competitor

Wayne Bergland is VP of US field sales for SCO and was subpoenaed in August by the DoJ. The main points he made were that SCO had had to get out of the desktop business because of Microsoft's competitive practices and now concentrated on the server market. SCO's five largest OEM licensees were Siemens, Compaq, Lucent, Unisys and NCR, although Lucent use SCO products in telephony, and not desktops. In introducing the videotaped deposition of Ron Rasmussen (VP of the volume systems group at the Santa Cruz Operation), David Boies, the DoJ special trial counsel, pointed out that Gates had identified SCO as an operating system competitor, although it was not mentioned that Microsoft has a significant financial stake in SCO. Rasmussen, who was subpoenaed by Microsoft, was evidently unhappy at having to be deposed for six hours. He was asked if SCO's operating system products came with any Internet-related technologies and replied that he could answer the question, but "I could probably take up all six hours". Unfortunately for Microsoft, there were many ways that the bundled Netscape browser could be removed from SCO operating system, so Microsoft made no headway. Microsoft had in any event decided not to port IE to SCO, as it evidently regarded SCO as having a server OS rather than a desktop OS. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like