A day after the government's lead trial lawyer, David Boies, raised questions about the accuracy of the presentation, Microsoft vice president James Allchin testified that computer technicians were summoned to conduct tests on the machine featured in the video. Their examination determined that the installation and subsequent removal of software for the Prodigy online service caused the error, he said.
Allchin had been forced to concede that the videotape might not be an accurate representation of a test he conducted to show that Microsoft's Windows 98 operating software is impaired when its Internet software is disabled.
At issue is whether a program devised by a government witness, Princeton computer scientist Edward Felten, successfully suppressed the Internet Explorer Web browser without impairing Windows. Allchin said the technicians' review of the machine in question showed that the inconsistency in the video did not undercut the validity of his tests, which showed Felten's program significantly cut the speed of Windows.
"We have the disk for that machine.... The video was correct," Allchin told U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.
Three members of Allchin's technical team flew to Washington yesterday after their boss was tripped up on cross-examination about the exhibit, company lawyers said. Allchin said he spoke by telephone with other team members at the company's Redmond, Washington, headquarters to find the source of the video's inconsistency.
In his cross-examination yesterday, Boies had frozen the videotape to one frame and pointed to an erroneous title bar message depicted on the screen. Allchin conceded that the message indicated that Felten's program had not been run on the computer before it was videotaped.
Today, Allchin said tests conducted on the machine overnight determined that the title message was erroneous, caused by a software interaction with a Prodigy program that once was on the machine but had been removed.
Felten's test "displays the title depending on what is a key in the registry [of the operating system]," Allchin explained. When Prodigy is uninstalled, "it changes that key. It basically deletes it," so that the erroneous title bar appeared on the screen, he said.
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