Allegations of evidence-falsification in the Microsoft antitrust trial fizzled Wednesday, deflating the government's claims that a bogus videotape showed the company could not be trusted.
Turns out it wasn't Microsoft malfeasance. An installation program for the Prodigy online service was the culprit.
Prodigy's uninstall option created a discrepancy in the videotaped presentation, which led to an embarrassing day Tuesday as Microsoft scrambled to figure out what had gone wrong.
By Wednesday morning, Microsoft had uncovered the problem. "If you install Prodigy ... it ends up changing the situation that is on this video," Microsoft senior vice president James Allchin said during questioning by a company lawyer.
Microsoft had installed Prodigy to demonstrate elsewhere in the videotape that it wouldn't work properly with a version of Windows the government had modified.
For a while on Tuesday, Microsoft was sweating as US Justice Department attorney David Boies gleefully reminded Allchin that he "swore this was accurate," but the videotape didn't appear to be.
Cell phone in hand, Tod Nielsen, general manager of Microsoft's developer relations group, rushed out of the courtroom and frantically phoned the employees in Redmond who prepared the tape.
Hadi Partovi and another engineer lost no time in getting to the airport. Packing two computers -- a laptop and a desktop -- they were on the next nonstop flight to Washington. As the plane sped east, they ran through the demo sequence and exchanged ideas via phone with colleagues back at the Microsoft campus in an attempt to get to the bottom of the problem.
Partovi had already participated in the trial, albeit from afar. In September, government attorneys descended on One Microsoft Way in Redmond to quiz the Internet Explorer product manager about the functions of certain operating system. The Justice Department entered part of that deposition into the court record in December.
