Microsoft Corp, seemingly emboldened by recent comments by Judge Jackson in its antitrust trial, is appealing the preliminary injunction ruling in its Java lawsuit with Sun Microsystems Inc. And if Christmas appears to have come early to Redmond, The Wall Street Journal’s well respected personal technology columnist Walter Mossberg yesterday helped turn on the lights when he came out and said in no uncertain terms that Windows 98 and Internet Explorer are truly integrated. That’s a change of mind from his same column a year ago when he wrote that Windows 95 and IE were as integrated as a bottle of shampoo. Department of Justice lawyers loved that. They won’t find his latest conclusions so pleasing, Mossberg observes. He is worried that any sanctions a defeated Microsoft would face might hurt the very people he speaks to in his column, PC consumers. In high technology, where things change so fast that the long run may never get here, can helping competitors actually harm consumers? I think the answer is yes, writes Mossberg. The courts, he says, shouldn’t impose any plan that makes average PC users work harder to get basic functionality. The industry does enough of that already.
