Jodie T. Allen is Slate’s Washington editor.
Day 18 of the Trial
I haven’t been so bored since fourth-grade grammar class.
The lawyers must think we are as slow to grasp a simple point about browser use as my classmate Peggy Ann Haley was to grasp the difference between an adjective and an adverb.
So for what seemed like an eon–really less than two hours–the government’s lawyer offered exhibit after exhibit to witness Glenn E. Weadock. The exhibits allowed Weadock, a Department of Justice-hired computer consultant, to reiterate a couple of points: 1) Some corporations (Boeing and two computer makers) that use computers with different operating systems would prefer to use a browser (Netscape) that works with all of them. That way, while they still have to train their workers in the use of the different basic systems, they don’t also have to train them to use different browsers. 2) Loading software that the user doesn’t want onto a computer can “clutter the desktop” and, especially on older computers, use up scarce memory and hard drive space. Fair enough. Now can we please move on? Not until the wheels of justice have ground this iota into subatomic dimension.
There is a surreal atmosphere about these hearings. Enormous amounts of time are spent trying to prove the obvious: that companies compete; that when they introduce new products they want to sell them (thereby increasing their “market share”–a bone of much contention in yesterday’s videotaped Bill Gates testimony); and that, especially in this industry of adolescents, the competitors do not like each other at all.
Having missed the brief excitement of Gates’ testimony yesterday, I have, a fellow journalist warns me, “bought back in at the low.” Even David Boies’ slender, black-clad wife looks a bit bored. I amuse myself by studying the tables full of lawyers on either side. I am looking especially for the “Hogarthian” John Warden and the “Vampire” Theodore Edelman, whom Michael Lewis described so amusingly. Alas, my eyesight is of a pedestrian cast. They all look pretty much the same to me.
Meanwhile, the pleasant-mannered Weadock, who said he had long worked as a consultant for Novell, a Utah-based software company, also seized the opportunity to put in a plug for his customer’s “netware.” Novell’s Internet software, he testified, is “loosely bundled” so that, unlike Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, it can be easily removed without damaging the operating system.
Weadock’s findings about the inseparability of Internet Explorer and Windows 95 did give Microsoft’s lawyer an opportunity later in the day to make an interesting point. Shortly after Weadock submitted his report to the DOJ last spring, the department requested relief from the courts that would have required Microsoft to do exactly what Weadock had said wasn’t possible: to remove IE3 completely without disabling the basic Windows operating system. When Microsoft said it couldn’t do that, the lawyer noted, the court cited that as “evidence of a bad attitude.”
I score a “scoop” at the break–or so my seatmate tells me when we return. Not knowing any better, I go up to Warden and ask him a few questions. Nothing earthshaking–really just an excuse to hear him talk. Indeed he has a wonderfully gravelly voice, but he is far more jovial than I had expected. Apparently he doesn’t usually talk to reporters, but I had to admit to my curious fellows that I hadn’t learned (hadn’t even tried to learn, worse yet) anything of significance.
Things pick up slightly with the introduction of yet another snippet of Gates on tape. It is just as has been reported. Microsoft’s chairman looks like a kid in after-school detention. At one point he loosens up and laughs at his own joke about a typo in one of his e-mails, but he is otherwise taciturn. Some of his answers come so slowly that the reporters ostentatiously count the seconds off on their watches. He has learned the wrong lessons from Bill Clinton. Like Clinton he quibbles over the meaning of words–“relate,” “concerned,” “software group.” Like the Intel executive whose taped deposition I saw replayed last week, he follows his lawyer’s counsel to a T, taking his time to scrutinize each piece of evidence and the phrasing of each question, and then answering as narrowly as possible. Unlike Clinton, he fails to anticipate how his deposition will look when played to an audience.
The videotape selection, chosen to show that Gates was concerned about the IBM software group’s enthusiasm for the (Windows competitor) “Java religion,” is followed by Microsoft lawyer Steve Holley’s cross-examination of IBM executive John Soyring. Soyring, who heads IBM’s network computing unit, denies he “had lunch with” a DOJ lawyer today but acknowledges he walked down the street with him to buy a takeout sandwich. He doesn’t know who did the original draft of the prepared testimony that he (like most other witnesses) submitted for the record (the implication of the lawyer’s question being that the DOJ did).
Soyring is saddened that IBM’s OS/2 system never became popular, as Windows did. He acknowledges that, as originally built in the late 1980s, OS/2 was too big to be handled by most PCs and that it couldn’t run all the 16-bit applications that had been developed for DOS and later Windows 3.1. So customers preferred Windows. That’s too bad for IBM. It’s not clear what the government (in its heyday, IBM’s greatest foe) is now supposed to do to make the company feel better.
Click here for MSNBC’s full coverage of trial developments.
