Stories by Patrick Thibodeau

  • MS/DOJ: Judge Hears Pricing Testimony

    Microsoft antitrust trial Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson closed the courtroom to hear testimony concerning Microsoft's pricing strategy. The judge's action means that the public will get, at best, "very general summaries" of the pricing information, said David Boies, the lead government counsel, outside of court here today.

  • MS/DOJ: Government Rests Its Case

    As Microsoft prepares to launch its defence against the government's charges that it controls a software monopoly, the proposed America Online-Netscape merger is once again taking a prominent role in the historic case.

  • Witness says bundling is inefficient

    Microsoft is making a misleading claim when it says it creates efficiencies by bundling the operating system with a Web browser, according to the US government's next expert witness in its antitrust lawsuit against the software giant. David Farber, a professor of telecommunications systems at the University of Pennsylvania is expected to testify Tuesday. He argued in a written testimony released late Monday that there are no technical barriers that prevent Microsoft from developing and selling its Windows operating system as a stand alone product.

  • The Microsoft files: Witness attacks Windows pricing

    The government this week returned to a back-to-basics strategy in the US vs Microsoft antitrust case, attacking Windows operating system pricing while reinforcing its argument that competition in the operating system market is impossible. The government's opportunity to examine some of the core reasons behind its antitrust lawsuit came at the end of Microsoft's cross-examination of government witness Frederick Warren-Boulton. Warren-Boulton, who seemed a little worn-out after four days of cross-examination, was given the opportunity during the government's redirect to outline the reasons why the software giant is a monopoly. "Microsoft can raise the price of its operating system without much concern of falloff" by personal computer manufacturers, said Warren-Boulton.

  • The Microsoft Files: Microsoft paints Apple as hardball player

    As part of its defense tactic in the US government's antitrust lawsuit against it, Microsoft yesterday painted Apple as a hardball competitor that threatened the company with a $US1.2 billion patent-infringement lawsuit. Microsoft, in the third week of its antitrust trial, used the patent dispute to offset Apple's claim that the software giant intended to cancel upgrades of Microsoft Office for Macintosh if Internet Explorer wasn't the default browser on Apple computers.

  • The Microsoft files: DOJ gets to counterattack

    It was lead Government attorney David Boies' turn on Tuesday in the Microsoft antitrust trial to question his star witness, Netscape president and CEO Jim Barksdale. And in rapid-fire sequence, Boies reviewed and reshuffled the volumes of e-mail evidence to create a portrait and a chronology of events that showed that Microsoft was out -- as the Government has alleged from the onset -- to crush Netscape. Barksdale's testimony ended on Tuesday. But he parted saying: "We did not bring this to the attention of the Department of Justice, just on behalf of Netscape. It's my personal opinion that the Internet is far too important to mankind to let any one company dominate."

  • IT Outsourcing a Gamble

    Information technology outsourcing deals are often rocky, with users complaining more than half the time about service levels, unexpected costs and dissatisfaction with vendor personnel