Strangely enough, US District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson has notified the press that his findings of fact in the Microsoft antitrust trial will be issued at 6.30pm on a Friday – but except that it won’t be today, October 22 1999, he hasn’t said which Friday it might be. Lawyers will be notified two hours before the rest of the world, but even they won’t know the outcome until the evening the finding is released. Observers speculate that the judge is concerned that his decision will affect the stock market. Jackson has already been burned: a comment on his part that the acquisition of Netscape by AOL could cause a very significant change in the playing field sent Microsoft shares skyrocketing within minutes.
The antitrust trial was a test of endurance, lasting 76 days, and even the release of the findings of fact won’t mark its conclusion. Once this decision is public, the government and Microsoft will present the judge with their respective proposed conclusions of law, which Jackson will consider before making his own findings of law. Finally, Jackson may propose remedies – suggestions have ranged from splitting the company apart into Baby Bills, to opening the application programming interfaces or source code to the Windows operating system, to slapping Microsoft on the wrist, to doing nothing. While this last remedy has been very strongly urged by Microsoft’s lawyers and by a phalanx of industry organizations, most of which receive Microsoft funding, it’s not especially likely.
