– Opinion polls show that the American public is – at best – unconcerned about the Microsoft case. If the trial continues beyond its allotted time – which looks ever more possible – the trickle of complaints about the strain on the public purse will likely become a torrent. And the Justice Department would certainly be wary of another debacle on a par with the IBM Corp trial of the seventies and early eighties. A waiting game may prove to be Microsoft’s trump card.
– Courtroom two is using an Apple Macintosh as the basis of its projection system, we don’t know if that shows bias or not.
– Did Theodore Edelman’s lengthy cross-examination, characterized by Microsoft as a long, slow, deliberate process start to irk Judge Jackson during Thursday’s session? The judge certainly took a more visible role in the proceedings, pulling up the defense counsel for mischaracterizing the witness’ words, expecting Avadis Tevanian to comment on documents he had not seen and on misleading questions. When Edelman introduced a Netscape document about optimizing Navigator to play QuickTime file types, the judge asked who had written the document. Edelman replied that it had been pulled off Netscape’s home page. Judge Jackson retorted, a lot of things are available over the web, they’re not necessarily admissible.
– RealNetworks Inc, no stranger to tangling with Redmond itself, was characterized as a multimedia kingpin by Microsoft Corp counsel yesterday. Theodore Edelman stated that the firm was considered the dominant player in multimedia streaming, with 85% market share, by the company’s own reckoning.
– Avadis Tevanian claimed that RealNetworks was just not relevant to the Apple/Microsoft case, but was reminded of the company’s deals with America Online Inc, Lotus Development Corp and Intel Corp. Edelman than asked if Apple’s QuickTime was considered a standard in multimedia authoring and Tevanian admitted that the product was some kind of de-facto industry standard. He allowed that RealNetworks and Apple dominate the two arenas. Edelman then asked, so what exactly does Microsoft dominate? The witness replied, they don’t – not yet.
– Talking about internal Apple discussion documents that suggested that Microsoft might adopt QuickTime as a standard file format, Tevanian dismissed them as not important at all. He said that they had been rejected out of hand by him and Steve Jobs. He stated that they were just discussions which weren’t prepared by business people, so that was okay, they were just engineers. But faced with an old Apple press release presented as evidence, Tevanian said of its contents, I caution you not to assume that marketing documents talk about how technology is built.
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