Jack Shafer is Slate’s deputy editor.
A Glass House on Constitution Avenue
On my first day at the Microsoft Trial, I have my first face-to-face meeting with a fellow who is a role model to me three times over, reporter Andrew Glass, a senior correspondent with Cox Newspaper’s Washington bureau. Andy is my hero because he’s covered all 41 days of the proceedings, and unlike the other Slate dilettantes who’ve preceded me to report on the trial in Courtroom 2 of the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse, he doesn’t complain, doesn’t roll his eyes, doesn’t call the trial boring.
He’s also a role model because, like me, he’s devoted to the antique word processor XyWrite. Now an orphan bit of software, essentially abandoned by its owners, XyWrite maintains a wild-ass corps of enthusiasts who love the product because it’s fast and eminently customizable. (Click here to visit XyWWWeb, the ultimate fount of XyWrite customizations.)
I’ve suffered for my devotion to XyWrite at my place of employment (full disclosure en regalia, the Microsoft Corp.). A junior developer once walked into my cubical while I had XyWrite up on my monitor, and he exploded: “What is it?! It’s ugly!” His idea of beauty, of course, was Microsoft Word.
During the morning recess, Andy and I kibitz about software, and he confesses that he uses IBM’s OS/2 operating system instead of Windows. Before we can argue the relative merits of OS/2 and Windows, Andy earns my high esteem a third time: He’s enjoying his tour of duty.
How can that be so? Microsoft witness Richard L. Schmalensee, an MIT economist, and government lead attorney David Boies are tangled up in a multiday game of call-and-response over how and why Microsoft “tied” its browser, Internet Explorer, to its Windows operating system. The morning’s Washington Post piece by Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains that the issue is moot. Unless consumers were hurt by the link between the browser and the OS, which a court last summer decided wasn’t the case, such linking is OK.
To say that Andy savors the examinations and cross-examinations is expecting too much. But not since I befriended now-retired Washington Post reporter Morton Mintz have I talked to a middle-aged reporter who so loves his work. Andy is uncontaminated by the stench of hack that wafts from many a reporter half his age and experience.
Some days, Andy says, he views Microsoft as the most “predatory” corporation on earth. Others, he thinks the government has no case. Many in the press corps, 25 or 30 strong this morning, yo-yo between those two points. The mix of reporters–Reuters guys whose beat is the Department of Justice but who know nothing about technology, and tech pressies who wouldn’t know the difference between Sherman and Clayton if you spelled it out for them–coexists nicely here.
“Legal reporters are learning a lot of tech,” he says, “and tech reporters are learning a lot about law.”
He continues, “It’s very civil here.” In the very early weeks of the trial, the hall monitors stopped reporters and lawyers from talking in the hallway during recesses. Now they’re pretty tolerant–but they’ll still scatter you if you cluster in the middle of the hallway.
“I maintain you don’t have to have a lot of knowledge about the law and tech to cover this trial.” That makes me feel good about my inadequacies until I realize Andy has a firm handle on both.
“What would help a reporter is an understanding of 15th century Italian politics. Having read Machiavelli helps a great deal,” he says. “The software industry often reminds me of the high Italian Renaissance. Is the pope up or is the pope down? Powers are forming alliances. There are the Borgias. I’m only partly kidding.”
As the morning recess ends and we return to the courtroom, Andy confides that the real story is not Windows’ domination of the desktop but the platform (and paradigm) shift that will attend the arrival of “broadband services”–wicked-fast connections to the Internet that will carry full motion, real-time video.
Thanks to Andy’s example, I pay closer attention to the Boies and Schmalensee pirouetting when it resumes. Andy ducks out of the trial a few minutes before 12:30 p.m.–as if on cue–just before Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, right on schedule for his nap, bottle, and diaper, rubs his eyes and declares a lunch recess.
I ditch the trial for the day and wander down Constitution Avenue looking for a cab. The columns, domes, and cornices of the museums and courts remind me of Gore Vidal’s great one-liner about Washington: “It will make great ruins.” As I drift into the mental space of 15th century Italy, I make a note to reread Machiavelli before returning to the trial and ask myself, “Is Bill Gates the true pope?”
Click here for MSNBC’s full coverage of trial developments.
