When Microsoft produced the written testimony of vice president Brad Chase, the text said pretty much what you'd expect.
America Online picked Internet Explorer because the technology was better, Chase claimed. Microsoft's browser was objectively snazzier and more useful than the competition's.
A previous witness had suggested that Chase was the guy who could answer all the government's questions about AOL, and that's what courtroom observers were expecting to see.
But when Chase took the stand Thursday, a Justice Department attorney didn't seem interested. Instead, David Boies spent hour after achingly tedious hour quizzing the Microsoft vice president about, of all things, the headaches of downloading software from the Internet.
"Are there things that can happen in the download process that can make it unsuccessful?" Boies demanded.
"How long an interruption in the phone line does it take" to snuff out a modem connection, he asked.
Modem hiccups and slothful speeds? This is the stuff of a federal lawsuit? It was on Thursday morning.
It's true, of course, that Boies is a remarkably cunning attorney and it's conceivable that this line of questioning will finish with fireworks, which he indisputably achieved last week.
Boies set out to argue that Netscape does not have a viable distribution channel via the Internet. To do that, he has to say that the hundreds of thousands of pesky "Netscape Now!" buttons amount to a mountain of missed opportunities.
Microsoft attorneys were chortling at Boies' questions, though it was hard to tell if the merriment was forced. "Distribution is the deadest herring in this controversy," Microsoft's William Neukom said.
US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson didn't seem particularly interested. Or even, at times, awake. "Perhaps we could take an early lunch recess," he suggested.
"He's really into the breaks," one observer mused. A TV reporter won brief acclaim from his colleagues when he predicted within 10 seconds when Jackson would halt the trial for the daily mid-morning recess. On Wednesday, another journalist calculated that Jackson's penchant for pauses meant that the trial lasted only three full hours a day.
To buttress his point, Boies highlighted a March 1998 deposition of a Microsoft program manager in which he said the long time it takes to download Internet Explorer is "incredibly discouraging to people."
"There's tons of feedback that suggest that downloading Internet Explorer takes too long and is too hard," said Joe Belfiore.
Did Chase agree? Well, yes and no. "We wanted to make Internet Explorer smaller so it would download more quickly," he said.
Chase said his colleague may have been a little too eager to engage in self-criticism, a practice he said is common inside Microsoft.
Microsoft said the government was living in the past by focusing on just 1997 numbers. "They have the numbers from the fall of 1998 and they're completely inverted," one lawyer said during the mid-morning break.
Email sent to Chase in March 1997 said "these people are not very likely to download anything, let alone a browser that takes two hours to download."
Before long, it was time for -- wait for it -- another break. Boies asked Chase to inspect an August 1997 Windows 98 project review so he could answer questions after lunch.
Boies didn't even show up for his customary banter with the 40-odd reporters gathered on the courthouse steps. But one new arrival did, in the form of Helen Krysiak -- a protester with a sheaf of handwritten flyers who decided to wander over to the press conference to see what was happening.
A sign clipped to her back said: "Ask President Clinton and Congress about Human and Civil Violations, Ms. Reno's Judicial Obstruction."
She didn't seem to have a position on the Microsoft trial.
