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"It reads like a novel"
Judge Jackson's findings are music to prosecutors' ears -- but Microsoft says it's guilty of nothing more than embodying "the most basic American values."
By Janelle Brown
[11/06/99]

21st Challenge
21st Challenge No. 28
Forward, march! Join the dance of the eternally circulating e-mail.
By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau
[11/06/99]

Is Linux the real remedy?
The open-source camp welcomes the findings of fact. But some think that Linux doesn't need the courts to beat Redmond.
By Andrew Leonard
[11/06/99]

Books
The best of all possible worlds
Dow at 36,000! No more cancer! The new techno-optimists gush about a picture-perfect future. Should we believe them?
By Mark Gimein
[11/04/99]

Getting smart, the stupid Web way
AltaVista's new marketing campaign says smart is the new sexy. So why is the search engine coming off so dumb?
By Rose Martelli
[11/03/99]

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Page after page of the document covers in detail the "how" of Microsoft's campaign. Jackson recounts how Microsoft, aiming to make Netscape's Navigator "a jolting experience," essentially sabotaged Netscape software by building incompatibilities into Windows; how Microsoft baited and then threatened computer manufacturers to steer clear of Netscape with promises of cash and threats of cutting off access to Windows; how Microsoft "integrated" its browser with the operating system to make Netscape irrelevant. Reading his account, it is clear that the tortured locutions, bizarre demonstrations and striking lapses of memory that Microsoft executives resorted to through much of the trial availed the defense little.

Reaction to the bombshell findings of fact By Janelle Brown View from the open-source camp By Andrew Leonard

Less obvious in Jackson's findings, and in many ways a more interesting question, is the "why." The story that comes through in the findings is that Microsoft, and Gates specifically, might have seen Netscape as more of a threat than it ever really was. By every conceivable means, Microsoft tried to smother a competitor that posed only a very hypothetical danger, far in the future. In fact, more than anything else, it is Microsoft's paranoia that winds up buttressing the government's theory of the case.

The browser conundrum: not part of the operating system, but a threat to the operating system.

Few images of the Microsoft's trial resonate as strongly as those of Gates, as well as subordinates like Daniel Rosen, denying in the most sense-defying terms the very existence of such a thing as a "browser." The denials elicited much merriment in the press. Microsoft tried to argue that it could not have tried to seize control of the "browser market," because there was no such thing, and its own browser (even in this sentence it's almost impossible to avoid the word) was just a component of the operating system.

Jackson explicitly rejects this argument. In Paragraph 154 of the findings he says unequivocally that Web browsers and operating systems are "separate products."

OK, that's easy. But here's where it gets harder, because to understand both Microsoft's motivations and Jackson's decision, it's crucial to accept that while they might be separate products, Netscape's browser and Microsoft's operating system do have one big thing in common: They both include applications programming interfaces (APIs) that let other software developers build programs "on top" of them.

In this way, the "browser" is distinguished from other, simpler applications. Most applications -- including browsers -- rely on the operating system to perform many low-level tasks. They can do this because the operating system's APIs effectively let programmers use code in the operating system instead of writing it from scratch.

Guess what? The browser's APIs let software developers do much the same thing, except that instead of relying on code in the operating system, they rely on code in the browser. Jackson thus calls browsers "middleware" in Paragraph 68 -- they rely on the operating system, but in turn let other programs rely on them.

"Microsoft," writes Jackson, "was apprehensive that ... there would arise a substantial number of full-featured applications that relied largely, or even wholly, on middleware APIs."

That's the tricky part: A browser is not "part" of the operating system, but Jackson believes that in many ways it's a lot like an operating system.

Next page | Windows -- from revenue king to commodity?