The trial so far, however, has focused on the behavior of Microsoft executives in their alleged efforts to illegally exploit their Windows monopoly. The highlights have been a series of courtroom gotchas! Last week the DOJ’s hired gun David Boies got his biggest gotcha! during the harrowing testimony of Microsoft VP Jim Allchin.
Here’s what it was: the heart of the DOJ case is the charge that Microsoft illegally ““tied’’ its Explorer browser to its Windows operating system. But Microsoft claims that Explorer is an integral part of Windows. Earlier, a government witness wrote a program that supposedly separated the two, something Microsoft considers impossible. So Microsoft introduced its own videotaped demo to establish that the DOJ witness’s program was flawed.
That’s when David Boies went to work. After getting Allchin to vouch for the video, Boies showed that the Microsoft demo was not reliable evidence, but an edited document. Implication: the Softies had cooked the bits.
But the judge allowed Allchin to re-create the experiment at their lawyers’ office on Wednesday night. The resulting video seemed to bear out the essence of Microsoft’s claims. Instead of a possible fraud, it just seemed that Microsoft screwed up with its first tape. Not for the first time in this trial, Microsoft had shot itself in the foot, casting a shadow on the reliability of all its evidence.
Hardly noticed, though, was the fascinating nature of that second tape, showed in court uncut, ““like a Warhol film,’’ said a Microsoft lawyer. It provided a damning snapshot of computer use, circa 1999. While the experiment itself involved esoteric tasks, Jim Allchin had to do something every computer user dreads: installing programs and running the Internet on a new PC.
The 47-year-old Allchin, known at Microsoft as ““the Windows guy,’’ first allowed himself time to ““start learning’’ the newly purchased IBM laptops, and then had to keep working ““until I understood how I could get a connection established pretty quickly.’’ He had a devil of a time hooking up his new ThinkPad, blaming the problem on local phone lines. ““I’m going to take my life in my hands,’’ he announced when the tape began, ““and connect on, hopefully, the Internet.''
The connection kept dropping out. Then came a weird error message he attributed to the IBM machines. And then there were things that were not errors, but simply the sorts of annoying user-hostile phenomena that are all too familiar: endless dialogue boxes, loud unwanted music, annoying rebooting, cluttered menus, even tough-to-open shrink-wrapped software boxes. At one point, Allchin wanted to install a Microsoft program that would not work until he keyed in the 11-digit number on the license agreement, written too small for him to see without his glasses (his assistant read the numbers to him). Then the Windows Guy didn’t know what to do next. ““It didn’t tell me to reboot,’’ he mused. ““But I thought you were supposed to reboot . . . ''
By the end of the demo, even though he felt he had proved his point, Allchin looked thoroughly beaten down–just like millions of other users who’d similarly lost their minds at about the midnight hour.
Ironically, Jim Allchin is the point man in Microsoft’s ““simplicity jihad,’’ its effort to make computers easy to use. His reality check is his mother, who uses a PC to perform church-related tasks. When she asks him computer-related questions, ““I just sink in my chair,’’ he once told me, ““because I know what’s coming. She asks me these simple questions. She says, “Why do I go to Start to shut the machine down?’ Questions that just make you feel like an idiot.''
When we had that conversation, of course, Jim Allchin’s concept of embarrassment had yet to undergo certain excruciating refinements–like a relentless cross-examination by a lawyer seemingly capable of conducting water torture in drought conditions. By the end of the week, David Boies was hailed as a present-day Perry Mason. And it’s true–he made the Microsofties look like fools.
But it’s also true that this trial is far removed from the real-world concerns of the people supposedly requiring protection from Microsoft’s monopolistic shenanigans. The browser wars are over–no longer do people obsessively compare the relative virtues of Microsoft’s Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator. (Anyway, Netscape is now part of media giant AOL.) The hot topic in high tech these days is ““appliance computing,’’ where the action moves from the desktop into zillions of other devices, from palmtop computers to ultrasmart telephones.
By the time Judge Jackson rules on this case, and the inevitable appeals are exhausted, the trial’s techno-Jesuitical disputes–like whether you can disable Explorer and still view Web pages with Windows 98–will be as antiquated as butter churns. The question that probably won’t be resolved, however, is the one that matters most to you, me and Jim Allchin’s mother: will computers ever be easy to use?
