Microsoft Threatened Apple, U.S. Contends
Taking a new tack in its antitrust case against Microsoft Corp., the government argued Tuesday that Netscape Communications Corp. was dropped as Apple Computer Inc.’s main Web browser supplier after Microsoft vowed to stop making a key Apple product.
The Justice Department’s lead attorney introduced notes by Apple’s chief financial officer contending that Apple’s August 1997 decision to bundle Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser with Apple computers was an anti-competitive quid pro quo. In the three pages of handwritten notes from a conversation with Netscape President James Barksdale, Apple Chief Financial Officer Fred Anderson wrote that his company “needed to ensure that Microsoft would continue to provide” the Microsoft Office business software for Apple products “or we were dead.”
Microsoft, Anderson continued, was “threatening to abandon” the Macintosh. And the price tag for Microsoft’s continued support, Anderson wrote, “was making [Microsoft] IE the default browser for the Mac.”
But Microsoft spokesman Mark Murray said outside the courtroom that the government glossed over other possible explanations for the Internet Explorer deal, including references in Anderson’s notes to Apple and Microsoft settling a patent dispute claim. Murray also noted that Anderson referred to Microsoft’s agreement to make a $150-million investment in Apple.
The introduction of the Apple document came as Barksdale, the government’s star witness, ended five days of testimony. Some advisors close to the government privately had feared that the 55-year-old former AT&T; executive might be vulnerable to a variety of attacks by Microsoft, including his encouragement of the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft.
But over five days of intense and sometimes combative grilling, Barksdale proved to be an elusive and often engaging witness whose verbal jousting with Microsoft lawyer John Warden occasionally drew courtroom laughter, even from presiding Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.
The government’s lead lawyer, David Boies, spent much of the day trying to dismantle Microsoft’s claim that a pivotal June 21, 1995, meeting between Microsoft and Netscape executives was a “setup” by Netscape to manufacture antitrust evidence against the software giant rather than to forge closer ties between the two companies.
Boies introduced a memo sent by Microsoft executive Paul Maritz to Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates that, Boies said, suggested Microsoft hoped to get Netscape to halt work on browsers that worked with Windows 95 in exchange for Microsoft agreeing to not compete against the Netscape browser on other operating systems such as Macintosh and Unix.
Using a multimedia presentation of videotaped testimony, scrolling text and other high-tech tools, Boies also introduced a pile of video testimony and written evidence, including nearly two dozen computer magazine reviews praising the quality of Netscape’s browser. Those reviews, Boies said, countered Microsoft’s allegations that Netscape lost Web browser market share because its product was inferior to Microsoft’s.
