Globetechnology: Microsoft tried to crush startup, suit claims — This is big. And if this goes over there is a software company called Slate that should take action next. I personally know Jerry Kaplan, and he’s a pretty nice guy. Of course I was never a big fan of these older pen-based devices and used to refer to the company as “Go Broke” Computers. And I believe that with or without Microsoft’s push, this would not have succeeded. Still,. Microsoft did what it did. It probably didn’t have to do anything. This is all because, at the time, Bill Gates went to the same group-think conferences where they were pumping up the pen-based ideas. He got freaked by group think. Interesting. If Microsoft loses this case it could cascade with every defunct pen-based maker suing the company. Microsoft now has its own pen-based initiative which does not help the situation. Curiously most of the writers at the time of the first iteration were all boosters too.

SAN FRANCISCO — The inventor of one of the precursors to handheld devices — an operating system that enabled computer users to write with a pen instead of a keyboard long suspected Microsoft Corp. of crushing his business.

Now, Jerrold Kaplan says he has the evidence %u2014 documents that surfaced during a class-action suit filed in Minnesota indicating that Microsoft chairman Bill Gates set out in the early 1990s to discourage other companies from doing business with Kaplan’s startup, Go Computer Inc.

An antitrust suit Kaplan filed in San Francisco federal court last week quotes from letters purportedly written by Gates, including one undated note allegedly sent to then Intel CEO Andy Grove, as evidence of Microsoft’s “collusive and exclusionary” business practices.