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A L S O__T O D A Y
T A B L E__T A L K Are you as sick of the Microsoft trial as you are of the Senate trial? Vent your frustrations about software monopolies, bad haircuts and all things Microsoft in the Digital Culture are of Table Talk
R E C E N T L Y Lawyers, guns, money? Let's Get This Straight Night of the living day traders Aliens blew up my garbage dump! First Amendment wins another round online - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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VIDEO KILLED THE MICROSOFT STAR | PAGE 1, 2
Boies shied away from accusing the company of fraud: "I'm not suggesting something nefarious happened in Redmond. All we know is the tape they put into evidence is not reliable," he said. The company's spin efforts throughout the week, illuminatingly, kept drawing comparisons between the bungled video and Microsoft's software products. "We make good software," senior vice president William Neukom stated, "but we didn't make a very good videotape." Company spokesman Mark Murray called the matter a "sideshow" and said: "One of the great things about the software business is that if there are some bugs in a first version of a product, you can go back and fix them. So Video 1.0 apparently had a few things that became confusing, so both sides agree we will be doing Video 2.0." Indeed, users of Microsoft software who are accustomed to buggy performance in early product releases might not be at all surprised that the company couldn't get its trial videotape right on a first or even second try. But a trial is fundamentally different from a software development cycle. Fixing broken software is easier than restoring broken trust. Assuming that Microsoft didn't set out to defraud the court, one can only imagine the following scenario among the videotapers in Redmond: Mid-level Microsofties are assigned the job of proving that Felten's program bollixes up Windows. The demonstration doesn't go quite as planned. Desperate to please their bosses, they edit together clips from more than one machine to make their case. They assume that no one will notice; after all, they think, outside of Microsoft, people don't really understand PCs very well, anyway. What could they have been thinking? What people at Microsoft too often seem to think: that they know better than the rest of the world. That they have a right to cut corners in defense of their company's interest. That it's OK to push the edges of acceptable behavior in their business battles. The videotape demonstration didn't show anything useful about Felten's
program or Windows/browser integration. Instead it proved a devastating
point that happens to lie at the heart of the antitrust case itself:
Microsoft's leaders, to borrow a phrase from that other trial taking place
across town in Washington, "want to win too badly." And in order to win the
victory they're morally certain they deserve, they are willing to play a
little dirty. Long after the world has forgotten what "Feltenize" means,
and no matter what the trial's verdict, Microsoft will have to live with
the fallout from this demonstration of its ethos.
Is
there such a thing as a software monopoly? Microsoft says no -- and its
arguments could provoke changes in the antitrust laws. Let's
Get This Straight Microsoft's staggering profits overshadow the
courtroom fireworks of the antitrust trial's first week. Let's
Get This Straight As the Microsoft trial begins, forget the browser
war and follow the money.
Come talk about the Microsoft antitrust trial in Table Talk's Digital Culture discussion area. |
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