Attorneys Ask for Microsoft Delay nytimes.com
Both sides in the Microsoft antitrust case asked a federal judge Friday for a three-week delay, which would push the trial back to mid-October.
After discussions in U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's chambers, lawyers proposed moving the trial from Sept. 23 to Oct. 15. Penfield did not rule immediately.
Isn't that World Series time? Who cares, baseball is boring. Antitrust would be too, without Bill acting as his own attorney.
The software company's lawyer, John Warden, called the antitrust case ''half-baked'' and urged the judge to dismiss the lawsuit, or at least important parts of it.
Maybe, or maybe Bill's goose is cooked. Who can say?
For the first time, the government cited internal documents by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates suggesting that America Online, the nation's largest Internet provider with more than 13 million customers, agreed to distribute Microsoft's browser software in exchange for including AOL's software within the Windows operating system.
Justice lawyer David Boies, referring to a note by Gates about a January 1996 meeting with AOL Chairman Stephen Case, said Case indicated that Microsoft's browser was technically not as advanced as a browser by rival Netscape Communications Corp. But, Gates wrote, Microsoft's browser was ''good enough,'' and AOL agreed to use Microsoft in exchange for ''favorable placement in the operating system,'' Boies said.
That allegation is significant because America Online competed directly with Microsoft's own online service, the Microsoft Network. The government suggested that Microsoft sacrificed its own MSN because it saw the risk that Internet browsers might eventually pose to Windows.
''They were even willing to put a bullet in the head of something they had a lot of hope for,'' Boies said, referring to MSN, an unqualified flop.
Boies has that wrong. I think Bill's phrase was "a stake through the heart" of MSN. Bill probably can't remember that one, though, or much of anything else. Premature senility, in this context.
Cheers, Dan. |
