Microsoft has been accused of urging a competitor to get out of the platform market the Redmond software company considered its own. The prosecution in the antitrust trial on Tuesday raised the issue of a meeting between Microsoft and bitter rival Netscape in June of 1995. My recollection is that we were discussing with Netscape whether they saw it in their advantage to build their high-level value-added software on top of our platform, instead of duplicating what we were already doing anyway, Microsoft group vice-president Paul Maritz told the court, it was our desire and is our desire to have everyone in the world build on top of Windows. Maritz reported that at the June 21 meeting, Netscape wunderkind Marc Andreessen had said he didn’t want any dicking around with low-level stuff. Maritz took that to mean Netscape didn’t want to be involved in enabling applications, but rather wanted to specialize in the applications themselves: ecommerce, groupware and the like. Yet earlier in his testimony, Maritz had said that he did consider Netscape a serious threat to Microsoft because of its ambition to build out its software into a platform. (It’s also interesting to wonder why Maritz calls Internet Explorer a low-level technology, hence part of the operating system, while Netscape’s software is a high- level, value-added application.) Government counsel David Boies demanded to know whether Microsoft had ever engaged in comparable deals with other vendors of competing platforms, or whether the company was in fact using special tactics in its dealings with Netscape. After much stalling, Maritz said that in the late eighties, his company had engaged in talks with both Sun Microsystems and AT&T. But if you’re asking for a deal which has all the same elements as this one, I can’t think of one, he said. I think that’s the best you’re going to get out of him, said Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to Boies before adjourning for the day.
