IP: IN ANTITRUST TRIAL, MICROSOFT SUGGESTS THAT E-MAIL TALK IS CHEAP -- from Edupage

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

The government's antitrust case against Microsoft has been developed to a 
large extent through the documentation provided by internal company e-mail 
messages that talked about attacking a rival technology by promoting a 
"polluted" version of it, discussed ways of causing "a great deal of harm" 
to another firm, and debated various other ways to defeat competitors. Was 
there anything wrong with such discussions? One antitrust expert, Richard 
J. Gray, says yes: "It's been devastating for Microsoft. It's showed what 
they were thinking, what they were focused on and what were the true 
purposes of these various acts, which could have had perfectly innocent 
explanations." But Microsoft attorneys take a different view, with John L. 
Warden saying, "The antitrust laws are not a code of civility in business," 
and William H. Neukom saying, "In some cases it's locker-room talk, in some 
cases it's idle talk, and in some cases it's talk among people who really 
didn't make the decisions." (Washington Post 12 Jan 99)