By William Fellows
Justice Department prosecutors yesterday piled on more video testimony from Microsoft Corp CEO Bill Gates and other industry executives to hammer home their claim that Windows and Internet Explorer are separate products and that Microsoft has illegally tied them together. Microsoft lawyers dismissed the latest hodge podge of video testimony as the government throwing mud at the wall and seeing what will stick. During Gates’ testimony, in which he again appeared unnecessarily evasive at times, he said that the software industry is always looking for next ‘killer application’. The latest confirmed ‘killer app’ is the web browser, Gates wrote in a May 1996 email to Microsoft executives. Although Microsoft attorney John Wharton pointed out that Gates’ clearly hadn’t said Internet Explorer itself was such a killer application. Prosecutors also produced an email from Paul Maritz to Gates which referred a three year plan for Windows suggesting Microsoft never intended IE to be a part of what eventually became Windows 98. Prosecutors then attempted to show how Microsoft can use its OEM power to coerce competition, even when it is as big as IBM Corp. The Justice Department’s charge is that Microsoft illegally used its monopoly in personal-computer operating systems to extend its dominance into web browsers. This argument was also the basis of the 1995 case against Microsoft, but suffered a set-back in June when an appeals court ruled that Microsoft was within its rights to integrate the browser into Windows; a ruling government lawyers will challenge based on evidence in the current case. Prosecutors showed a March 1994 email from Joachim Kempin to Gates in which the Microsoft VP in charge of managing relationships with manufacturers described how IBM might be pressurized to decrease its support for Lotus Notes (at that time a competitor, but also a potential platform for IE). Kempin said: I am willing to do whatever is necessary to kick them out, but strongly believe we need a WW hit team to attack IBM as a large account, whereby the OEM relationship [for Windows] should be used to apply some pressure. Microsoft spokesperson Mark Murray said the email had no relevance because it was sent even before Microsoft had begun integrating IE into Windows. He said Microsoft clearly didn’t pressurize IBM because IBM bought shortly after the email was sent. He noted that even now Microsoft still licenses Windows to IBM.
