– Court proceedings on Monday at the Microsoft antitrust trial began with a closed session, while Microsoft witness Richard Schmalensee fought it out with the Department of Justice over – depending on who you believe – pricing or the Netscape/AOL deal. Microsoft filed a motion on Friday to initiate discovery proceedings about the Netscape/AOL/Sun deal, and Judge Jackson ordered the government to supply to Microsoft a series of documents, including the AOL merger plan, and they have all, not surprisingly, been designated highly confidential.
– Spinning the afternoon session on the courthouse steps, Boies said Microsoft was using Office as a club to require shipment of Internet Explorer… If what they’re doing is using a club, no matter what the club is, that’s the antitrust violation. Microsoft’s Neukom had another slant: The government has spent an entire afternoon trying to rewrite history we already knew, he said, the origin of this deal was the resolution of the patent controversy. So if the patent dispute really was such a big deal, why do Gates and Maffei keep talking about IE? Where are the emails and memoranda discussing patents? They’re probably under attorney-client privilege, Neukom told ComputerWire. He admitted, however, that he had not been involved in the Apple deal.
– The Microsoft trial has run so far over its allotted time that on Monday morning Judge Jackson had to reschedule three cases. He told the plaintiffs that he was otherwise engaged, with no immediate prospect of surcease… I am genuinely sorry. We’ve been reading about it, one lawyer quipped.
– Department of Justice lead counsel David Boies told reporters that he wants to cross-examine each of the Microsoft witnesses in a day or less. I don’t believe in long cross-examinations, he said. If he sticks to his words, the weary judge might finally obtain surcease. Boies admits, however, that he’s setting himself a challenging task. I’ve been optimistic before, he conceded.
– The presenter of two of the three software demonstrations on a video submitted as evidence by Microsoft’s lawyers this morning was none other than Vinod Vallopillil, the young engineer who wrote the infamous Halloween documents. These were internal Microsoft memos comparing the open source operating system Linux with the company’s rival offerings. Vallopillil concluded that Linux presents a real threat to Windows, a finding which delighted open source developers when the documents were leaked. Valloppillil acquitted himself with professional elan in the evidentiary video. What next for this rising star of print and screen?
– Boies scored an early point against Microsoft when he challenged an article of evidence offered by Joel Warden. Warden said the IBM Network Computing Software division strategy document came from an IBM web site. When Boies said that it did not, Warden read the URL – www.scripting.com. That is not an IBM web site, said Boies with a grin. On the contrary, it belongs to the outspoken software developer Dave Winer. They have made efforts to authenticate [the IBM strategy document] and have not succeeded, Boies concluded. Warden withdrew the document pending my investigation of its status.
– To the disappointment of trial-watchers who had become fond of the bearded South African’s happy turn of phrase, Microsoft group VP Paul Maritz denied ever saying to Intel executives that Microsoft planned to cut off Netscape’s air supply. However Boies said that Maritz had never tried to have the New York Times article which attributed the quote to him corrected, which he would have done had he been misquoted. Boies also produced documents in which he said Maritz made statements that amounted to the same thing. Maritz rejected both assertions. In his written testimony, he also claimed he’d never said Microsoft would kill HTML. Sigh. Next he’ll be repudiating his most famous phrase: Embrace, extend, extinguish.
