Justice Whacks Allchin's Credibility
Filed at 8:44 p.m. EST
By Darryl K. Taft for Computer Reseller News, CMPnet
The government continued its attack on the testimony of Microsoft's top technical expert Tuesday afternoon.
David Boies, the government's lead attorney in the case, questioned Microsoft's witness, James Allchin, senior vice president of the company's personal and business systems division, about his own words regarding the integration of Microsoft Internet Explorer into the Windows operating system.
Boies displayed an e-mail authored by Allchin that indicated that Allchin was thinking as late as 1997 that Microsoft's Internet browser could simply "plug in" to the operating system environment, rather than be strongly integrated into the system as Microsoft contends.
The March 13, 1997 e-mail from Allchin to Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz advised that the company should "Move the Shell -- but not the browser -- to the OS team. This was my recommendation before as you know. It may not be the thing you want to do for other reasons, but it is the right thing to do for the OS (both Memphis [code-name for Windows 98] and NT). IE4 would just plug into the environment."
When Boies introduced this e-mail in an attempt to hammer home the government's point that browser and OS can be easily separated, Allchin strenuously objected to its use as evidence of his thinking to date.
"This is just wrong," Allchin said. "What I wrote here is wrong."
Allchin said that at the time he wrote the e-mail he "wasn't certain how integrated they were," referring to the two components. He said because of the makeup of the teams working on the various aspects of the code, "I was wrong about being able to move those people independently."
Allchin also said that at the time he wrote the message there was "a great deal of frustration" in the core Memphis [Windows 98] team and core Windows NT team that the quality of some of the shell components was not "appropriate." And he was simply trying to alleviate quality problems.
Another point Allchin made in the March 13, 1997 e-mail was to "drop IE 4 from Memphis and NT 5. There is a strong push to do this. We are wasting hundreds of people's time on builds that don't work, etc."
Boies spent another part of Tuesday afternoon asking Allchin why Microsoft made it possible for users to remove lots of other technology from Windows 98, such as the TCP/IP stack, but not the Internet Explorer browser. Allchin said the browser is core technology, whereas many of the technologies that are removable are simply drivers.
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