Microsoft Exec Concedes Glitch in Video

A top Microsoft Corp. official conceded Tuesday that there are discrepancies in a videotaped demonstration that the company has used in its defense in the antitrust case.

Senior Vice President James Allchin admitted under questioning that a video purporting to show a reenactment of a software test he conducted last year appears to have been fouled up. Allchin’s concession came after lead Justice Department lawyer David Boies hammered away at the 90-minute demonstration, which Microsoft aired in court a day earlier to show that the Windows 98 operating system is damaged when its companion Internet Explorer browser is removed.

The demo compared two personal computers: one running Microsoft’s Windows 98 software update feature with its companion Internet Explorer Web browser intact, the other running the update program with major components of the Web browser removed by a software program created by government expert witness Edward Felton.

Allchin has challenged Felton’s testimony that Internet Explorer can be safely removed from Windows. Microsoft maintains that removing the browser can cripple the operating system.

The issue has become central in the landmark antitrust trial. Microsoft has claimed that integrating features such as Web browsers into computer operating systems is a common industry practice and provides benefits to consumers.

But the Justice Department, 19 states and the District of Columbia say the integration amounts to an unlawful “tying” of two separate products. They contend that Microsoft is a monopolist and, thus, isn’t permitted under law to leverage its dominant Windows operating system to achieve similar ubiquity for Explorer.

In his cross-examination, Boies zeroed in on two frames from the demonstration video to point out what appeared to be an inconsistency: a software “title bar” whose heading changes in the middle of the test.

Boies got Allchin to admit that the computer in the video that a Microsoft announcer claims was impaired looked like it had not run Felton’s Internet Explorer removal program. Allchin testified that the title bar’s change indicated that the PC the announcer said was impaired was actually unmodified.

Under redirect examination by Microsoft lawyer Steve Holley, however, Allchin reversed himself. He said he checked with his staff at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., during the court’s lunchtime break and they determined that the PC depicted in the video was, in fact, the government-modified machine, as Allchin originally maintained.

Outside court, Microsoft executives defended their video demonstration as accurate but said they could not explain the anomalies depicted in the title bar captions.

“We are not sure why this happened,” said Microsoft General Counsel William Neukom. “This is a tiny, tiny part of a very long tape.” The glitch in the title bar, Neukom said, “stands for the fact that things can happen with software.”

Boies was also at a loss to explain what might have happened in the demonstration but said that was not his role and that the demonstration reflected poorly on Microsoft’s credibility. “I’m not going to say something nefarious happened in Redmond,” said Boies. “All we know is that tape is not reliable.”

In other developments Tuesday, Microsoft released the testimony of Rational Software Corp. President Michael T. Devlin. In his 20 pages of written testimony, the executive said that if Internet Explorer is removed from Windows 98, some software products made by his company would not run properly.