Microsoft lawyers played a revised videotape in court Thursday afternoon in an attempt to put an embarrassing week behind them.
The video, produced during an all-night recording session Wednesday, showed that a version of Windows 98 modified by a government expert in an attempt to disable Internet Explorer is buggy and crashes some third-party software.
However, it did not show what Microsoft claimed was a performance slowdown, and a government lawyer claimed that as a victory. One government lawyer claimed that the bugs its program caused could be fixed. "You would expect a concept work like that to have problems," US Department of Justice lawyer David Boies said, and a Microsoft witness agreed.
For a window onto the Microsoft antitrust trial, visit US v. Microsoft. - - - - - -
Portions of the "Videotape 2.0" also contradicted earlier claims by government lawyers. Their technical expert, a Princeton University computer scientist, had claimed a program he wrote barred Internet Explorer users from the Web.
"The program removes all the methods by which the user can access the Web," government witness Edward Felten testified in December.
But Microsoft demonstrated Thursday that Felten's claim was not accurate. On a "Feltenized" version of Windows, users could browse Web sites by typing addresses into Windows Help.
Microsoft hopes to refute a government claim that by gluing Internet Explorer into Windows, the firm violated antitrust laws restricting monopolists from combining separate products. Microsoft denies the allegation and says the products are seamlessly integrated.
But Boies dismissed the contradiction as irrelevant and instead focused on a controversial earlier videotape that the judge presiding over the antitrust trial called "very troubling."
The video claims a Feltenized Win 98 takes a "very long time" to access Microsoft's Windows Update Web site. But a careful look at the video, Boies suggested Tuesday, showed that Windows had not been altered. Microsoft also admitted to using multiple machines rather than one "virgin" one.
"We're as good at video production as the government is at software design," Microsoft developer-relations manager Tod Nielsen said Thursday.
Bowing to pressure by the end of the day Wednesday, the company's lawyers promised to record another videotape -- this time, with government lawyers in the room. As the phalanx of Microsoft PR representatives and lawyers streamed out of the second-floor courtroom, they scrambled to figure out how they would do it.
