There's always a different view of who is doing well...
From The NY Times:
nytimes.com
<<Government Witness Refutes Microsoft
Arguments on Browser
By JOEL BRINKLEY
ASHINGTON -- The Government's final witness in the antitrust
trial against the Microsoft Corporation on Thursday pulled apart
many of Microsoft's arguments for tying a Web browser with the
Windows operating system by showing that the company's own behavior
often belies its courtroom justifications.
The witness, Edward W. Felten, a
computer science professor at Princeton
University, is making his second
appearance in court for the Government.
The first time he testified, last December,
he made an important point for the
Government by showing that Microsoft
could have offered Windows 98 without a
workable Web browser -- something
Microsoft had called impossible.
In fact, Microsoft's effort later in the trial
to debunk his December testimony using
videotape demonstrations was so filled
with errors and misleading assertions --
discovered by Dr. Felten and his assistants -- that the testimony proved to
be an embarrassing courtroom debacle.
A central allegation of the Government in the case against Microsoft is that
the company improperly used its dominance in operating system sales to
increase its share of the Web browser market. Microsoft maintains that
the browser and the operating system are sold together because they are
inextricably linked, and are essentially one product.
On Thursday, Dr. Felten, under friendly questioning from a Government
lawyer, ran through a series of justifications that Microsoft witnesses had
offered for combining the browser, Internet Explorer, with the operating
system.
As an example, the lawyer recalled the testimony of James Allchin, a
senior Microsoft executive, who said it was extraordinarily important to
outside software developers writing programs for Windows to know that
the browser was already there so that they wouldn't have to include it with
their own programs if they intended to call on any of the browser's
features.
But Dr. Felten pointed out that half a dozen of Microsoft's own programs,
like Money and Front Page, fail to follow that maxim, because in every
case these separate programs come with Internet Explorer included.
Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson nodded during this testimony and asked
Dr. Felten, "Why do they do it?"
Among the tens of million of personal computers in use, Dr. Felten
explained, many different versions of Internet Explorer are installed -- or
no version at all. As a result, no software developer -- not even Microsoft
-- can assume it is there.>>
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