A. David Cutler, the creator of Windows NT

We approached Dave after filing the patent and after reading Bill Gates' paper "information at your fingertips" which was given at Comdex 90. The significance of this view to us was the concept that programs should be distributed over a network in real time, and that it was more important to have a facile means of distributing code than to provide speedy access to raw data. We called him, moreover. When we took the trouble to go down and see him, however, he threw us out of his office and referred us to:

B. Paul Maritz, the vice president of Systems(actually he has a different title now)

Dear Paul! This kind man offered to have us arrested for trespassing on the day we went to see David Cutler. And he refused to meet, talk, or correspond with us, save to send us this letter. This was the final result of a concerted effort to talk to the very top people at Microsoft, and included us having a letter hand-delivered to Bill Gates via a family friend. It was only after the said hand-delivered letter that we received this brush-off from Mr. Maritz (note the cc to Bill Gates, presumably because Bill directed him to write to us).

When finally the next year, 1992, Microsoft held a public developer's conference, we were able to embarrass Maritz into talking to us in public because there were a bunch of Microsoft customers watching. It certainly is hard to reach those in command at Microsoft. Paul's only comment (having just given a speech in which he extolled the virtues of "push" technology, an almost laughable idea compared to the code server technique) was to tell us to call him when we had a patent. Paraphrased, Microsoft's official response was "well, we wont talk to you unless you are a direct threat". 

C. David Cole

David was present at a one-day seminar on OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) in Seattle's Westin Hotel in November 1992 (he now doesnt remember this meeting but at least had the courtesy to reply to our email). This was the first Microsoft employee who had any sort of concept of what we were talking about. We had a short but wide-ranging discussion which touched on the existence of DCOM (not too well known at that time), being the networked version of the underlying technology (COM) behind OLE. But nothing came of that. 

In early 1998, after receiving news that the US Patent would finally be granted, we wrote to David. This inquiry landed very quickly in the lap of Microsoft's corporate legal department.

So... the sleeping giant finally awakes. 

Note particularly the phrase "Please direct all future communications with Microsoft concerning this matter to me." A very strong message here - don't bother our execs.

D. Bart Eppenauer
We quickly established a rapport with Mr Eppenauer. To our surprise Microsoft took us very seriously. In a short time, they had apparently got a copy of the complete file, along with some other documents we sent them, and subjected it to internal AND external review. REC's patent attorney estimates the cost of that review by external legal counsel would have cost MS between $15,000 and $40,000.

Microsoft eventually made us an offer. Needless to say we did not accept it since as they put it, "we feel you should at least get out what you put in". But the very fact of getting a substantial cash offer means that at least MS takes this idea seriously. How seriously they need to take it has yet to be seen :)