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A L S O__T O D A Y
T A B L E__T A L K Are you as sick of the Microsoft trial as you are of the Senate trial? Vent your frustrations about software monopolies, bad haircuts and all things Microsoft in the Digital Culture are of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Lawyers, guns, money? Let's Get This Straight Night of the living day traders Aliens blew up my garbage dump! First Amendment wins another round online - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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Video killed the Microsoft star
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | What could they have been thinking? That's the question Microsoft observers who thought they'd seen it all from the software superpower are now asking after the company's most embarrassing moments yet in its lengthy antitrust battle with the U.S. Department of Justice. It was Microsoft's own lead witness last month, economist Richard Schmalensee, who -- confronted with his own law-review article from the 1980s declaring that "persistent excess profits" could indicate that a company is a monopoly -- scratched his head and asked, "What could I have been thinking?" But the bigger puzzler in this trial now is: What was going through Microsoft's collective mind when the company prepared the videotape demonstration that blew up in its face last week? Earlier in the trial, a Princeton professor named Edward Felten had employed a software program to disable the Internet Explorer browser's code in Windows 98. Microsoft wanted to prove that you can't separate the two products -- that its browser is "fully integrated" into the operating system -- so it created a videotaped demo to show that if you "Feltenized" a Windows computer, you'd degrade its performance and experience crashes. Before we even consider the controversy surrounding the tape, let's pause a minute. Experienced users of Windows know that, if you want to degrade its performance and experience crashes, you don't need Professor Felten's help. All you need to do is use Windows heavily for more than a day or so without rebooting, and, no matter how much memory you have installed, your "system resources" will begin to run low, programs will start to cough and stutter and, sooner or later, you're going down. Like most complex software, Windows is imperfect, and there are so many different factors that can lead to degraded performance and crashes that any demonstration of a specific cause-and-effect is suspect from the start. Furthermore, the substance of the arguments over Felten's program is a little ridiculous: No one questions that Microsoft has the ability to weave two formerly separate products, Windows 95 and the IE browser, into a single software product -- Windows 98 -- in which you cannot separate the two functions without causing glitches and problems. At issue is Microsoft's motivation for doing so: Was the union of browser and OS an "innovation" meant to benefit consumers, or was it a calculated move to squeeze a competitor, Netscape, out of the market? In this era of modular code, surely it would have been possible for Microsoft to provide all the benefits of browser integration in a package of discrete files that you could plug in and remove as you wished. Such an "innovation" would still offer the much-touted benefits of integration while leaving a final choice in the hands of consumers. Instead, Microsoft seems to have deliberately chosen to entangle the code of the browser with that of the OS -- precisely so that it could show, in court, that the formerly separate products are now inextricably intertwined. Given this technical strategy -- you could call it "legal code" -- it's no wonder Microsoft went after Felten's program with such determination. What's astonishing is how badly the company botched its attack. In cross-examining Microsoft senior vice president James Allchin, David Boies, the lead government counsel, was able to show that Microsoft's video, which purported to show the "Feltenized" performance degradation on one PC, apparently stitched together footage of two or more different computers. Though Microsoft spent the rest of the week scrambling to duplicate the test in a second videotape, it was never able to fully prove its point, and its credibility lay in tatters. Which brings us back to the question: What could they have been thinking? - - - - - - - - - - - -
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