Below, Intranet Journal presents Mr. O'Reilly's letter and Microsoft's answering press release -- a case study in the power of the Internet to communicate with, and influence, giants.

An Open Letter to the Internet Community

First, the facts (which have previously been mentioned about [sic] on WS Talk): NT Workstation 4.0 will limit the number of unique IP addresses which can contact a Web server to 10 or fewer in a 10-minute period. No previous version of NT Workstation has contained this limitation. Of course, this effectively eliminates NT Workstation as an option for Internet or Intranet Web server usage.

Now, the implications: this development will choke off one of the most important new directions for the Web: its return to its roots as a groupware information sharing system for the desktop. Like email and the PC itself, Web publishing belongs on the desktop. With the higher price tag of NT Server ($999 vs. $290), users who have never before put up a web site will be extremely unlikely to do so.

This move by Microsoft will hurt the efforts of Web developers, Intranet developers, and Internet service providers, a great many of whom have been happy to create sites on NT Workstation. Microsoft has been saying that IIS (the Web server they include with NT Server) is free, and quite clearly, this is now exposed as untrue. Developers will have to stick with the older NT Workstation operating system if they want to use any server other than IIS (noted for its security problems), or will have to upgrade and pay extra for the server of their choice.

As Bob Denny says: "When I first started developing Web servers in 1994, nearly all Web serving was done on the Unix platform. Considering that companies such as O'Reilly & Associates, Netscape, and a half dozen more, pushed hard in the fight to legitimize NT vs. Unix as a Web server platform over the last 18 months, Microsoft's actions are pretty extreme."

I've sent email to Bill Gates to let him know of my personal concern about the impact of his plans on Web users and developers. I encourage anyone interested in maintaining the open systems nature of the Web to send email to Microsoft, post this news on their sites and in newsgroups, and write letters to editors, to put pressure on Microsoft to reverse their decision. They've reversed such decisions before, when people have expressed their opinions about an important issue such as this.

Regards,

Tim O'Reilly
President
O'Reilly & Associates

Microsoft's July 19 Press Release

REDMOND, Wash. - July 19, 1996 - Microsoft Corp. today announced that it has decided to remove a technical limitation under evaluation in the Microsoft Windows NTWorkstation operating system version 4.0 beta that restricted inbound TCP/IP connections to 10 unique IP addresses. The company appreciates the rigorous customer beta testing and subsequent customer feedback that led to this decision.

Microsoft believes this decision is in the best interests of the large number of customers who are planning to base their Internet and intranet solutions on Windows NT. This decision will also help customers deploying distributed peer-to-peer applications. During the beta period, Microsoft found that various user scenarios were affected by the proposed limits in the TCP/IP stack.

Microsoft believes customers are best served by a production Web server that runs on a dedicated mission-critical server such as Windows NT Server. In contrast, Windows NTWorkstation is optimized for use as an interactive workstati on. Microsoft will introduce a compelling upgrade to make it easier for customers testing or running Web servers onWindows NT Workstation 3.51 to upgrade and take advantage of the high-performance tuning of Windows NT Server 4.0. Pricing and availability will be announced later.