COURT NOTES: U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns has ruled that two college professors cannot be forced to give Microsoft copies of taped interviews made with Netscape executives. The interviews, recorded by professors David Yoffie of Harvard University and Michael Cusumano of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were made for an upcoming book, 'Competing on Internet Time: Lessons from Netscape and its Battle with Microsoft'.
The Justice Department filed another subpoena against Microsoft requesting access to the company's sales database. Microsoft had given Justice lawyers printout from the files, but they had apparently been altered. Information contained in the 4GB files should give more valuable evidence about revenue the company received from licensing to key manufacturing partners. Microsoft argued that it would have to provide investigators with expensive hardware to view the files, but Justice countered that by requesting to view the files at Microsoft's Redmond headquarters, which already have such hardware available. Judge Jackson sided with the Justice lawyers and gave them full access, saying that what Microsoft provided "doesn’t make any sense.. It's gibberish."
Improving its already poor standing in the computer press, earlier this month Microsoft decided to file suit against a computer journalist. Microsoft served C|Net News.com reporter Dan Goodin with a subpoena, requesting that he turn over documents referred to in his September 23rd story, 'Microsoft's Holy War on Java'. In that column, Goodin cited "evidence not yet public" in the Sun v. Microsoft case.
In his opening statement, head Microsoft lawyer John Warde referred to the government as "Netscape's bully," called in to protect it from a fierce - yet legally correct - competitor. Warde then called the Justice Department a group of "Luddites" and accused it of making a personal attack against Bill Gates, distorting e-mail, and taking evidence out of context. Later in the statement Microsoft lawyers defended "integrating" IE with Windows and downplayed a 1995 meeting in which Netscape says the company asked them to not make any products for Windows.
Following opening statements, government lawyers brought Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale to the stand as their first witness. In his testimony Barksdale explained how, in 1995, Microsoft tried to make an agreement with internet startup Netscape. The two companies had met several times that year to discuss technical standards, so when Microsoft proposed another meet on June 21 Barksdale gladly agreed. But in that meeting Microsoft did something unexpected. "They proposed that a 'line' be drawn between the area in which we developed products and competed and the area in which they developed products," Barksdale said in written testimony. "I have never been in a meeting in my 33-year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we should either stop competing with it or the competitor would kill us." Barksdale then said that Microsoft offered to invest in Netscape to sweeten their deal.
To reenforce Barksdale's testimony, DOJ attorney David Boies introduced a number of seemingly incriminating Microsoft documents. In one such document - an e-mail dated May 31, 1995 - Microsoft CEO Gates expresses an intrest in seeing some type of Netscape deal come about. Ms' Warden then attacked Barksdale, saying that they falsified notes on the 1995 meeting in order to bring them up if there was ever a need for evidence against The Behemoth. This is incredible foresight, as it means Netscape executives had to be planning a Microsoft antitrust case as far back as Spring 1995. DOJ lawyers rebutted this by explaining Netscape didn't even notify its lawyers about the incident until later that year after Compaq cancelled a bundling deal because of Microsoftian pressure.
Other witnesses showed Microsoft's trait of pressuring PC manufacturers and ISPs to dump support for Netscape products. An official at one of the ISPs, Earthlink, described their negotiations with Microsoft as "medieval, meaning that 'the King' [i.e., Microsoft] tells you what he wants and you are expected to comply." Roberta Katz, senior vice president for Netscape, also quoted Earthlink officials in an August 1996 e-mail as saying that in their negotiations with Microsoft the company was very explicit about its "plan to kill Netscape." Earthlink signed a contract with Microsoft anyway because, according to Katz, the officials said they had to maintain access to Microsoft's distribution channel through the sale of its operating system.
In other messages to Netscape, ISPs reported Microsoft offers of irresistible amounts of money for advertising, free product upgrades and other incentives if they switched to Internet Explorer; but the majority of them also complained about the Microsoft conditions, which included preventing the distribution of any Netscape products and putting IE logos on company home pages.

Meanwhile, in that OTHER Microsoft trial - Microsoft v. Sun Microsystems - five different briefs filed earlier in the case were unsealed by the court. One document, apparently some kind of memo from Bill Gates, says that Java "scares the hell out of me." Other papers filed by Sun quote a Microsoft executive as saying "[W]ithout something to pollute Java more to Windows.. we expose ourselves to more portable code on other platforms." Release of the previously sealed documents paves the way for District Court Judge Ronald Whyte to rule on Sun's request for a preliminary injunction. The uncovered evidence will undoubtedly boost the government case as well.

A new Internet Explorer bug has been uncovered by Juan Carlos García Cuartango, a Spanish Web developer. It apparently allows JavaScript on a Web page to steal virtually any file off a user's hard disk. The page's creator has to know where your files are located, but that isn't too difficult since most people use each program's default file location. Microsoft has acknowled the problem and now has a patch avilable. Users who have difficulty downloading the patch from Microsoft's overloaded web site can also correct the problem by turning off active scripting. This latest security hole is due to extensions Microsoft added to HTML and JavaScript as part of Internet Explorer's latest Dynamic HTML features, so it only affects version 4.

Tired of only dominating the computer software industry, Microsoft last week announced a new $199 cordless phone for PCs running Windows. The new Microsoft Cordless Phone System has a standard cordless phone handset that works with a base unit plugged into the computer. Included software has built in speech recognition, voicemail functions, answering machine, incoming call logs and caller-ID. The product, expected to ship in November, also works with Outlook mailboxes. Future versions of MsPhone (as we will call it from now on) may be integrated with WinCE. Goodbye Ma Bell, hello Ma Bill!

An International Data Corp study conducted in September shows that Oracle's NT database profits are growing faster than Microsoft's. Oracle's share of the $1.1 billion NT database market in 1997 was 35.7 percent, or $393 million, while Microsoft had 30.4 percent, or $335 million. From 1996 to 1997, Oracle's NT database-license revenue grew 87.2 percent, while Microsoft's grew 56.7 percent. However Microsoft is still selling more NT databases than Oracle, even though Oracle is making more money.

In a similar report, Zona Research says that while IE is now the leading browser on home computers, corporate web surfers prefer Netscape products. Netscape's rise to 60% of the field is mostly due to the company's decision earlier this year to give its browsers away. Incidentally, about 85% of the corporate users that run IE say that their company requires thet they do so.

Taking an unexpected turn, a Linux version of Microsoft MediaPlayer was recently posted on the company web site. Microsoft says that the ported version is due to "customer demand" that the product work on all operting systems, but that's highly unlikely since the majority of Linux users loathe Microsoft and its products. More likely than not, someone working at The Behemoth was simply playing around and changed around the Solaris version of MediaPlayer to see if it would work with Linux. Ported versions of other Microsoft products are not expected anywhere in this dimension.

Earlier this month The Behemoth shipped version 6 of its Java "development" software, J--. New features include "enhanced data access" and tools to create ActiveX controls. J-- 6.0 Standard Edition costs $109, while the Professional Edition sells for $550.
On October 8 Microsoft officially launched Windows CE 2.11 and a new line of WinCE-based handheld computers. The new handhelds - now even larger than before and beginning to resemble laptops - now support wireless network cards and other battery-consuming features generally not associated with handheld computing. Most participating vendors will ship the new WinCE systems in early 1999.
Microsoft has made much ado lately out of Dell's "company-wide" switch of its networks to NT. But apparently not everyone at Dell has been impressed; someone working inside the PC manufacturer tells us that Dell's manufacturing department has opted to stick with more dependable Novell Netware and NDS.
Much to the relief of Intuit, Microsoft has decided to delay the release of its new tax software, TaxSaver, until some "technical problems" have been corrected. People who saw advance copies of the product say this was probably a wise decision, since most tax software users aren't very tolerant of bugs. But since the market for tax preparation software is so profitable, Microsoft will no doubt try again sometime in the near future.
Someone recently surfing across the pathetic Microsoft.com web site stumbled across a link to download a "Year 200 [sic] Inspection Utility." This makes us wonder if Microsoft has found a problem more severe than Y2K...

_{How a Giant Software Maker Played the Game of Hardball}
Password/Login: msbc/microsoft
_{Microsoft Enterprise Bundling Draws Fire
ITxpo: Reaction to Gates shows paradox
Microsoft Memo Offers a Glimpse of Gates 2.0}
Password/Login: msbc/microsoft
_{Myhrvold and His Vanity
The World’s Richest Men}