Bristol vs. Microsoft Case Nears End

Closing arguments in the Microsoft Corp. vs. Bristol Technology Inc. antitrust trial will be held today, lawyers said. The case probably will be handed to the nine-person jury in Bridgeport federal court Wednesday afternoon, climaxing a heated, “David versus Goliath” trial that began on June 2. Danbury, Conn.-based Bristol, a small firm with $8 million in revenue, accuses the $14.5-billion Microsoft of trying to extend its alleged monopoly in desktop operating systems into the departmental-server and technical workstation markets. Bristol claims it was victimized by Microsoft’s supposed “Trojan horse” strategy of gaining a foothold in the server and workstation markets and then killing off competition from the Unix operating systems. But the software giant argues that Bristol has taken a mere contract dispute and tried to dress it up with antitrust claims that simply do not hold water. Bristol, a former source-code licensing partner of Microsoft’s, seeks up to $263 million in damages. Bristol makes a product called Wind/U, which acts as a bridge between developers writing software for computers based both on Microsoft’s Windows and Unix.

The Bristol lawsuit is unrelated to the federal lawsuit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and 19 attorneys general.