Judge Surprises Court by Suggesting Microsoft Rival Moved Too Slowly

The judge in the Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial startled the courtroom Thursday by asking a Sun Microsystems Inc. engineer if his company had simply moved too slowly against the software industry’s leader in a highly competitive environment--as Microsoft itself contends.

The government’s case is based on the allegation that Microsoft acted unfairly against competitors that threatened its monopoly in the operating system for personal computers.

During four days of cross-examination spread over two weeks, Microsoft lawyer Tom Burt presented documents and asked questions of James Gosling, a senior Sun Microsystems engineer, to suggest that Microsoft had built a better, faster version of a product based on the Java programming language developed by Sun.

On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson picked up on that, asking Gosling: “Didn’t what Microsoft do was grasp the significance of the work you were doing, and then run with it and produce a better version of it? They simply couldn’t wait for you to catch up.”

Gosling replied, “They represent it as better, but their version of ‘better’ is tied to the Windows platform” and fails to work with other operating systems.

Microsoft has acknowledged repeatedly in testimony that in 1996 it considered Java to be a threat because of the promise that software written in the language could run on a wide range of computers, regardless of what operating system they use.

Sun has alleged that Microsoft “polluted” Java with a special version for Windows in order to sabotage its “run-anywhere” capabilities.