More on the Sendo case

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

Given that Sendo alledge that the SPV is reliant on stolen IP, this is kind of relevant.

http://www.guykewney.com/articles/030220-brown.html

The Microsoft/Sendo battle is the thing that is definitely on everybody's lips, here at Cannes 3GSM. And one question has many people here puzzled: "Whatever happened to Marc Brown?" - or more accurately, what didn't happen to him?

Marc Brown, for those who didn't read the trial transcripts, was a Microsoft employee, who was Microsoft's official nominee to the Board of phone maker Sendo.

He was given the job because Microsoft bought 5% or so of Sendo's shares, as part of their "strategic partnership" which ended in tears last October/November, and in fisticuffs soon after. That was when Sendo cancelled the contract, and then sued Microsoft for a long list of horrible things, including fraud.

But from the date when the "alliance" was announced, Brown was on the board of Sendo. Nobody disputes that much. And he was also still employed by Microsoft; that, too, isn't in dispute.

My question to Microsoft is this: Does Marc Brown, director of Microsoft's corporate development and strategy group, still have a job at Microsoft?

For some reason, this question has an answer which is top secret. After gossip here at Cannes, I think I understand why: and the clue, people are saying, comes in Microsoft's counter-suit against Sendo.

Here's the problem. Sendo pulled out of the deal to produce the Z100 smartphone, on the grounds that Microsoft was trying to bankrupt the phone company, and steal its secrets - and that it had, in fact, already pre-empted this coup by giving these secrets to Taiwanese hardware builder, HTC.

The trick, according to Sendo's court statement, was in the contract. The deal between Microsoft and Sendo said that Microsoft would give Sendo money to build the phone, and provide software to make it work. Sendo would build the phone, and deliver it by end October 2002. If this didn't happen, then Sendo would be in breach of contract. And (the sting) - if Sendo at any stage went bust, all its assets would become the property of Microsoft.

Microsoft, says Sendo, deliberately attempted to bankrupt the smaller company; because it didn't deliver the software necessary to make the phone work, and wouldn't provide the money until the phone worked - thus effectively starving Sendo of working capital, and forcing it into bankruptcy.

That much is all in the official claim. And the counter claim, by Microsoft, is that Sendo was in financial trouble, and hid this from Microsoft which, when it found out, naturally tried to have Sendo wound up to protect its interests.

What people here in Cannes can't understand, is how this was concealed from Microsoft.

As far as anybody can find out, Marc Brown - a Microsoft employee - attended every Sendo Board meeting, at which the ongoing financial situation with Microsoft was widely discussed.

There are minutes of every Board meeting. They are on file. Marc Brown, therefore, knew everything there was to know, surely?

So if Microsoft didn't know what Marc Brown knew, we have some interesting options. Either, Brown carelessly forgot to mention the impending financial disaster which threatened Sendo, which many employers would regard as culpable misbehaviour. Or, alternatively, Brown deliberately concealed these figures from Microsoft and was a party to the fraud. Or, perhaps, he slept through all the Board meetings.

Whichever way, the question comes back to the one we started with. If Brown failed to notice, or failed to report, the significance of these figures, it would sound to most of us like a severe dereliction of duty - with the phrase "culpable and severe misconduct" often mentioned in conversations here in Cannes. Indeed, most HR staff would find such behaviour hard to forgive.

So is Microsoft employing him? Still? And if so, wouldn't this ever so slightly suggest that Microsoft doesn't honestly think there was any fraud at all, but that it is simply a way of drawing out the lawsuit?

Or are we discovering a hitherto unsuspected soft, forgiving, and warm cuddly-bunny side to Microsoft?

[Guest Gorskar]

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

Before anyone comes up with "Oh, it's just more Anti-Microsoft bias", I'd point out that I've been reading Kewney's columns in various respected PC magazines since before the 286 was considered "state of the art". He brought a London Microsoft product press-rollout to a standstill when he asked about the rumoured bug in it - when the PR director assured him that it was a mere rumour, he replied "That's NOT what Bill Gates told me when I spoke to him yesterday!" Kewney's been in the game long enough to be on first-name terms with most of the shapers and movers. It was he that wrote the review of the SPV for Ziff-Davis - one of the USA's most prestigeous computer magazine publishers. Generally speaking, he gets his news from high inside the company, and is accurate - both in his reports AND his "informed guesses." He runs his own website (dealing with mobile comms generally) at www.guykewney.com = and his regular column continues to be published in the UK's longest-established PC magazine, "PCW".

[Guest Chris b.a.r.f.]

Food for thought, your original post. With regard to your second post, I don't count Ziff-Davis as a particularly reliable/unbiased source of information (just my opinion, you understand)

[Guest sarge]

I've also been reading Guy Kewneys columns since the early eighties, mainly in the apparently vain hope that he will one day say something worthwhile!

[Guest Big Ron - No Longer a Mem]

I've also been reading Guy Kewneys columns since the early eighties, mainly in the apparently vain hope that he will one day say something worthwhile!

Then your view on "worth mentioning" and mine differ substantially. It was (for example) Kewney who broke the "CHKDISK bug" story. Back when 200meg HDD's were sexy, MS DOS 6.x's CHKDISK command contained a tiny but kind of interesting feature, which Microsoft kept very quiet about: use CHKDISK /F ("check disk for errors and repair them") on a 200 meg HDD, or one with 200 meg partitions on it... and it re-wrote thousands of copies of the FAT all over the data on the drive.

That's why MS rapidly bought-in "Scandisk", and why, if you tried to use CHKDSK (from habit) you got a long spiel on screen telling you how much BETTER Scandisk did the job. A "warning, this product can trash your hard drive!" warning on the packaging might have been more appropriate. MS were so busy playing catch-up to the feature-rich DR DOS that they didn't properly Beta test the product... and nobody realised that it was DOS itself that caused the problem. Not, that is, until Kewney broke the story.