Sitting in on Brad Pederson's overview interview about the history of Citrix technology advances, I was surprised to hear his take on reasons why MS shook Citrix's tree back in 1997.
While some may point the finger at MS strong-arm tactics & potential-revenue hunting, Brad commented that MS may have had a higher priority. He made the point that NT was at that time "getting successful" (I would say, "taking off like a rocket in the enterprise"). His observation was that MS was primarily concerned with potential future fragmentation of the NT kernel, and had drawn a lesson from what had happened with UNIX-flavor vendoring, which had hurt individual UNIX vendors.
I'm not going to go into the ins & outs of what Citrix was doing with the NT kernel at the time, and why this could be an issue. A great article on this subject & the crisis, published by USA Today and written at the time by Kevin Maney, can be found here at
From my point of view though, in 1997 I was doing my MCSE on NT3.51. My dad was a UNIX-man, so I had an earful of various flavors available.
So Brad's comment sounded pretty valid, considering too that he's the chief architect at Citrix and has been with the company since 1989.
Good to see MS not always getting bad press for business strategies & takeover practices.
