– After a US jury acquitted former agriculture secretary Mike Espy of 30 corruption charges on Wednesday night following a four-year, $20m investigation, the usual court-steps summary sessions for the Microsoft antitrust trial, being held in the same court house, were usurped. When Microsoft spokeperson Mark Murray did manage to get to the microphone to comment on what had on the most part been a rather embarrassing day for the Microsoft side, he began – This has been a good day for Mi…ke Espy.
– It’s sometimes hard to tell just how much technical understanding the lawyers on both sides of the Microsoft antitrust case actually have. Microsoft lawyer Tom Burt was forced to abandon a number of lines of questioning when James Gosling provided unexpected answers that threatened to undermine his case. One was over Java’s support for mouse clicks. Microsoft had sought to show that cross-platform Java programs would only be able to include support for a single mouse button if it were to support the single button mouse used on an Apple Macintosh. A Microsoft mouse typically has two buttons, a Unix mouse three. Gosling denied it was a problem, and began to explain how it could be done. He was cut short by the lunch recess and the subject was never returned to. And in the videotaped deposition of Bill Gates, it was frequently clear that Gates was becoming exasperated when government lead attorney Boies occasionally appeared to misunderstand aspects of the technology. One instance, at least, was successfully disguised. When asked about why he wasn’t aware of the development of the J/Direct native access method, as he claimed, Gates replied It’s just a thunk. Without pause, Boies continued. My question is: Did you know that they were trying to develop this thunk? He admitted afterward he had no idea what thunk meant. If he didn’t know about J/Direct before, during and after it was developed, as he said, then maybe he chose the wrong word Boies told reporters. The term thunk, which has been in use since the early 1960s, is usually defined as a piece of coding which provides an address.
– It should come as no surprise after the pissing on JDK testimony on Wednesday, but Microsoft Corp believes it will still have a faster Java virtual machine than Sun Microsystems Inc even after Sun releases JDK 1.2 Java Development Kit next Monday. We are very confident we will keep our performance lead, said Microsoft’s Charles Fitzgerald. Sun is still trying to catch up he said, citing features such as debugging, profiling, garbage collection, package management, graphical user interface widgets and monitor support that Microsoft has had for some time.
– Netscape Communications Corp’s Mark Andreessen isn’t making any friends on either side of the court. He has been quoted as saying, in conjunction with the broadening of Java and browser technologies towards operating system functionality, that his goal was to relegate Windows to be a set of partially debugged device drivers. And, after he had evidently changed his mind about the merits of Java, he said the following. My joke is that a Java Navigator will have a lot of good attributes: It’s slower. It will crash more and have fewer features. So you can do fewer things. It will simplify your life.
– One episode in court Thursday showed how far apart some of the various divisions within Sun Microsystems actually are. Microsoft lawyers released an email from Sun’s Chet Silvestri, in charge of Sun’s efforts to get JavaStation network computers up and running in 1996. Reacting to initial reports of Microsoft’s early performance lead with a Java JIT just-in-time compiler, Silvestri insisted that something be done to boost the performance of Sun’s own Java technology. Combining this compiled/tuned Explorer with a MS JIT means a (cheap) Pentium PC will make NCs look pathetic unless we do the same, he wrote to Scott McNealy, Alan Baratz, Ed Zander and others on September 6, 1996. James Gosling, however, insisted that performance wasn’t Sun’s main development goal for Java at this time. Our licensing program was set up so other vendors would license the technology and do the platform specific things needed for performance. Our efforts were focused on correct execution across platform.
– The proceedings also revealed how minimal Sun’s Java development resources actually were compared with those of Microsoft Corp. The really scary thing, wrote James Gosling in May 1996, after a preview of Microsoft’s JVM development work in Redmond, was how much effort they’re putting into it. They have a *team* dealing with the debugger API, another *team* dealing with GC [garbage collection] … where we have a small slice of a person for each. Avoiding getting steamrollered seems pretty tough.
– Microsoft Corp is now using four stock examples to back up its contention that cross-platform Java doesn’t work. The failures of Corel Corp’s Java Office Suite and Netscape Communications Corp’s Javagator Java-based browser have been well covered. And Microsoft has previously referred to the Lotus eSuite set of applications, the first version of which, never properly released, was written in 100% pure Java. It didn’t work properly, claims Microsoft, and the recently launched version was built with Microsoft tools and runs only on Windows. Microsoft’s fourth example is Tom Clancy’s Red Storm Entertainment Inc games company. The Red Storm game itself was written in Java, but ran too slowly and got very poor reviews, says Microsoft. The company reverted to C++ for its next game, Rainbow 6, which was much more successful. Microsoft has made no comment so far on Red Storm’s latest game, Ruthless.com, the main villain of which is a company called EvilSoft Inc. It is described as a game of economic growth and vicious business strategy. Red Storm denies EvilSoft is based on any particular company.
