Microsoft Corp seems to be fighting fire with fire in its landmark antitrust case, responding to widened allegations against the company by dragging all of its major competitors into the center of the legal storm. Microsoft, which has repeatedly said that the Justice Department unfairly expanded its case against the company on the eve of the trial, has now issued subpoenas to Netscape, Sun, Novell, Oracle, Apple and IBM, among others. Redmond’s request for documents from the companies, mostly regarding meetings between them, appears to be a counter attack to the latest charges by attempting to prove a certain degree of collusion among its rivals against Microsoft. In essence, the company is hoping to mitigate charges that it strong-armed customers and competitors by showing that others have done exactly what Microsoft is accused of doing by collaborating against it in the areas of Unix and Java, among other things. Microsoft had previously requested information posted by employees on Netscape’s internal electronic bulletin boards in what is believed to be an effort to discredit the company’s management and its technology. News of the wave of subpoenas comes as allegations have surfaced that Microsoft may have pressured Digital Equipment Corp into abandoning its work on a network computer that could have posed a threat to the software giant (see separate story). For now, it is unclear whether this issue will find it way into the overall case.
