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...beyond the angry words and legal documents, the proposed remedy marked the culmination of 23 months of state and federal pursuit of Microsoft and represents a clear watershed for the computer and software industries. The ruling that emerges from Judge Jackson's court, and from an appeals process that could last two more years, will do much to determine the course of software development for decades to come--and with it the programs that countless companies and consumers...
...Microsoft attorney William Neukom plans to push for an extension of the company's May 10 deadline for responding to last Friday's Justice Department proposal. Microsoft will want "months and months" of additional hearings in front of Jackson, who ruled on April 3 that the company had illegally and repeatedly used its monopoly power to stifle innovation. A final decision by Jackson might not come until the end of summer. Even then, any breakup that the judge might call for would be on hold until the appeals process is done. That's why Klein and the states want Jackson...
...such marketplace realities have meant little to Klein and the state attorneys general, whose relations with one another have been contentious from the get-go. Some states first sought to charge that Microsoft's Office suite of programs--which include such software mainstays as Word, Excel and PowerPoint--has a monopoly of its own. But by April 1, a Saturday, all the trustbusters' positions were beginning to converge. That's when mediation talks between Microsoft and the prosecutors broke down, a development Klein learned about while working on the weekend in his third-floor office at Justice. That day, Klein...
...would a breakup prevent future Netscapes--whose browser Microsoft ran over--from being illegally squashed? "It's a gamble," says lawyer and economist Robert Litan, of the Brookings Institution, who once worked for the Justice Department's antitrust division. Litan, who believes the Feds should go even further, joined three fellow economists in a separate brief that called for Microsoft to be split into three competing pieces. The trouble with Klein's remedy, Litan argues, is that where once there was one monopoly there now could be two--the applications and Windows sides--with the possibility that they will find...
...From Microsoft's perspective, no breakup is even remotely thinkable. Gates says it's functionally impossible to split the operating system from the applications side. Why? They're interdependent, he insists, and enhance each other. Microsofties point out that consumers, understandably, love that. Moreover, says Gates, "Microsoft could never have developed Windows under these rules." Indeed, by any measure, breaking up is hard...