Closing arguments in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust case have been scheduled for June 19. The arguments will be the last open court session before U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly makes her ruling. Closing arguments will be preceded by three hearings scheduled for this week, and filings of proposed factual and legal filings by both sides on June 10.
On Wednesday, the judge will hear arguments on three motions by Microsoft to dismiss evidence or sharply limit the scope of the antitrust remedy proposed by nine state attorneys general. On Thursday, she'll hear arguments on two Microsoft motions to dismiss the case altogether.
On Friday, each side will present experts to discuss enforcement of whatever antitrust remedy is imposed by the judge. Facing off will be two former chiefs of the Justice Department's antitrust division.
Intel announced dramatic price cuts for its current line of Celeron microprocessors, leading the way for a new generation of Celerons based on Pentium 4 technology. The company will probably announce the new Celerons, which will debut at speeds of 1.7 and 1.8 GHz, on Monday, with PC makers shipping systems based on the new chips early next week.
Even with the move to a Pentium 4-based design, the low-end Celeron family will see less significant performance boosts, thanks to smaller on-chip cache sizes and other technical limitations. But the new Celerons will still offer some enhancements over the previous generation, which topped out at speeds of 1.3 GHz. They will use a 400 MHz system bus, for example, compare to 100 MHz for the previous generation. And the new Celerons will utilize the NetBurst architecture found in the Pentium 4, providing such advanced internal features as the Hyper Pipelined Technology and Rapid Execution Engine.
Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo will launch new campaigns in the game console wars next week, with the main weapons this time involving online gaming and price cuts. The Electronic Entertainment Expo, the game industry's main trade show, kicks off May 22 in Los Angeles. Games are the premier attraction at E3, with publishers showing off every title they plan to release during the coming year. Highlights this year range from previews of potential blockbusters such as "Doom III" to a video jigsaw puzzle featuring Penthouse's Miss April. But hardware manufacturers will make their dent before the show starts, including several days of press events intended to set up business strategies for the coming year.
After 32 days of testimony, software giant Microsoft presented the final witness in its own defense Friday. The company is trying to ward off penalties demanded by the nine states that refused last November to go along with the U.S. Department of Justice's settlement offer. Carl Howe, research director at Forrester, told NewsFactor that he expects several written filings in the coming weeks as each side attempts to "present a road map through the evidence." Howe said there will likely be two sets of rulings, similar to the findings of fact and findings of law that were handed down by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in the original Microsoft trial. "I don't think we're going to get black or white. Each side is going to get something. The real question is, how much? What are the proportions: 60-40 or 90-10?" he noted.
Another procedural error on the part of the plaintiff states in the Microsoft antitrust trial has prevented evidence from getting into court. And that evidence, involving a specialized operating system called Windows XP Embedded, could have made the states' case. On Thursday, lawyers representing the nine litigating states and the District of Columbia canceled a May 15 XP Embedded demonstration after being reprimanded by the judge. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly--under pressure to resolve the case on schedule--said the states' legal team had failed to give the court proper notice about the scope of the demonstration and the amount of information Microsoft would have to sift through to respond to it.
Today, the nature of the debate has shifted and the voices have been tempered--largely due to the successes of AOL's biggest challengers. The most vocal critic, Microsoft, has shown signs of closing AOL's lead, helped in part by the folding of its instant messaging application into its Windows operating system. Web portal Yahoo, which joined Microsoft in its criticism of AOL, has also watched its Yahoo Messenger service surge in popularity and has embedded it throughout many of its Web services.
Data suggest that AOL's lead is not as secure as it seems, however. For example, since October, all three companies have seen their instant messaging services post double-digit gains in active, at-work users in the United States, according to Internet measurement company Jupiter Media Metrix. Microsoft's MSN Messenger showed the largest gain, with a 33 percent increase between October 2001 and March 2002 to a total of 6.8 million users. Yahoo Messenger added 24 percent more users, for a total of 4.5 million, during that period. AIM grew 22 percent, to 7.5 million users.
Microsoft has released an integration pack designed to tie together its Content Management Server and SharePoint Portal Server products. Available as a free download from the Microsoft Developer Network, the integration software allows SharePoint and CMS customers to consistently manage content throughout its lifecycle, according to Chris Ramsey, product manager at Microsoft. Unifying CMS and SharePoint increases worker productivity by allowing the knowledge worker to stay in the portal environment while creating and publishing content to Content Management Server, he said.
"One of the major benefits is being able to easily get access to documents in SharePoint and publish them on the Web site in CMS while keeping the link between the managed repository in SharePoint for documents and the published version on the Web site live," Ramsey said.
Testimony in the Microsoft antitrust case ended last week after the company scored some key tactical victories but also raised questions about the credibility of its opposition to a central proposed sanction, legal experts say. Still, analysts say a conservative federal judge will likely take a cautious approach as she weighs a proposed settlement against nine states' push for tougher penalties. Microsoft lawyer Dan Webb told reporters, ''Microsoft has clearly shown that consumers, Microsoft and the entire (PC) ecosystem would suffer'' under their curbs.
Microsoft got a big lift when the government's economic witness, Carl Shapiro, declined to support or oppose the mandate for a modular Windows, saying software design is a ''thorny'' area for the government to regulate. Microsoft, outmaneuvered the states in some procedural matters. The states, for instance, failed to submit evidence that Microsoft could bully PC makers under the settlement because the giant dropped from its witness list executives who deal with makers.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Federal District Court in Washington, who has little background in either technology or antitrust law, has reserved judgment on the fundamental issue of how broad the scope of a remedy should be. This week, after a crash course on high-tech industries, which featured the frequent use of arcane acronyms and testimony from executives and experts from all corners of the business, Judge Kollar-Kotelly will finally hear oral arguments on a Microsoft motion to exclude much of the evidence the states presented.
As the two sides prepare their findings of fact before giving their closing arguments now scheduled for mid-June about the only thing they seem to agree on is that Judge Kollar-Kotelly has worked diligently to understand the case.
If you have just finally finished figuring out the relationship between the various versions of operating systems coming out from Microsoft over the past couple of years, get ready to be challenged once again. The successor line to the server versions of the Windows 2000 operating system is called .NET Server and is currently available as a Beta 3 release to MSDN subscribers and other beta testers. It was originally called Whistler Server, but after the Beta 2 release it acquired a new name (despite an interim announcement that Whistler Server would be released as Windows 2002 Server). In this article I'll try to summarize what is new and exciting in this new release.