The company said the revised demonstration doesn't fully support its claim that disabling Windows 98's Internet technology harms the operating system's performance.
The new test was conducted to allay doubts voiced yesterday by the judge in the antitrust case about the accuracy of a Microsoft videotape test. U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson granted Microsoft's request to redo the test after the government's chief trial lawyer exposed discrepancies in the video played in court.
Jackson said yesterday in a private conference with lawyers that, while he did not believe Microsoft set out to deceive him with the video, lead government trial lawyer David Boies did "a very professional job of discrediting those tapes."
Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray said the new test, conducted in the presence of government lawyers and technical experts, did not resolve an important point: whether disabling the browser slows certain Windows 98 Internet functions.
That is a key component of the disputed video demonstration, which Microsoft first introduced to rebut testimony from a government technical expert who contended he wrote software that disabled Windows' browser without harming the operating system.
On the tape, a narrator noted the difficulty of locating an Internet Web site consumers can use to download updated Windows software--a special feature of Windows 98. The narrator on the videotape said the version of Windows with the disabled browser "is taking a very long time" and pointed to "performance degradation" due to the browser's absence.
A key allegation in the government's case is that Microsoft welded Internet Explorer into Windows to crush competition from Netscape Communication Corp.'s rival Navigator browser. Microsoft argues Windows 98 is a single, integrated product created to offer consumers better technology, not to foil competition.
Microsoft official Tod Nielsen said during the test, four different online connections were made to the Internet at different speeds. That test did not replicate the conditions shown on the videotaped demonstration Microsoft played in court earlier.
"Each time we connected we got a different performance," Nielsen said. "It would have been unfair to either side to compare one machine at one rate and another" machine at a different rate, Nielsen said.
Nielsen argued, though, that the Internet speed issue was not the primary part of the video demonstration, which showed that the government witness' browser-removal program "doesn't remove Internet Explorer and breaks Windows. . .The [Internet] performance was an additional thing that it did,'' he said.
Murray said the Internet-disabled program was unable to download new software from the Windows Web site and several software programs could not successfully be loaded onto the two machines used in the new test.
Murray had told reporters earlier the that new test "resolves once and for all any questions about the reliability of our evidence."
Witnesses kept waiting
Government representatives were kept waiting last night for two hours before the test began while computers were being set up in a conference room at the offices of Microsoft's law firm, Sullivan and Cromwell. By prior agreement, government representatives were not allowed in the room until the test was ready to begin, said Microsoft spokesman Vivek Varma.
Before the government representatives entered the room, Allchin performed a rehearsal test on one of six machines purchased for session, Varma said. That machine, though, was set aside and not used in the test that was videotaped for presentation in court, Varma said.
The videotape presentation that backfired in court this week was intended to support Microsoft Senior Vice President James Allchin's testimony that a program devised by Princeton University computer scientist Edward Felten to turn off the company's Internet Explorer Web browser degraded the performance of Windows.
After court adjourned yesterday, Microsoft attorney Steven Holley and Boies approached the judge for a private discussion in which Jackson gave Microsoft an opportunity to redo its video demonstration. Holley apologized that the video demonstration, "which?got bollixed up."
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