"It certainly casts doubt on the reliability of the demonstration," U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson told Microsoft vice president James Allchin. Allchin conceded under cross-examination that he was not sure whether the videotape purporting to show one computer actually showed a single machine or several.
"How can I rely on it if you can't tell me it's the same machine?" Jackson asked Allchin. "It's very troubling."
"I still stand by my testimony that my program" demonstrates that removing Microsoft's Web browser from the Windows operating system causes problems, Allchin said. The government maintains the Web browser can be disabled without impairing Windows.
Microsoft said Allchin would repeat his test overnight in the presence of both company and government lawyers and submit his results to the judge when court reconvenes.
"It will confirm exactly what Jim Allchin has testified to," said William Neukom, Microsoft's general counsel.
The videotape recreated a test which Allchin said he performed to show that a government witness' program removing the browser from Windows 98 degraded the performance of the operating system.
The judge rebuffed Allchin's offer to "bring in a machine and show you."
"Talk to your lawyer," Jackson said, before he conferred with attorneys in a private conference and abruptly adjourned the trial for the day.
The judge's comments came a day after Allchin was forced to concede that the videotape demonstration might not be an accurate representation of his experiment. The test was performed in an attempt to rebut testimony by Princeton University computer scientist Edward Felten, who said a program he wrote easily disabled the Internet Explorer browser without impairing Windows.
The issue is critical to the government's case against Microsoft. The software giant is accused of welding the Web browsing software into Windows to crush competition from Netscape Communications. Microsoft says Windows 98 is a single, integrated product that was developed to give computer users better technology, not to hurt Netscape or other competitors.
Mark Murray, a Microsoft spokesman, sought to laugh off the controversy, which he called "sort of a sideshow."
"One of the great things about the software business is that if there are some bugs in a first version of a product, you can go back and fix them," Murray said. "So Video 1.0 apparently had a few things that became confusing, so both sides agree we will be doing Video 2.0."
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