Microsoft Attorney: Sun Lawsuit Is Ploy For Sun To Maintain Java Advantage

"Before .Net was conceived and before development began, Java was alone in [its market," said Microsoft Attorney David Talchin in his opening statement before Judge J. Frederick Motz in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland. In fact, "Microsoft's entry into this market is a procompetitive act," Talchin said.

Microsoft's .Net platform is widely viewed as Microsoft's competitive response to the Java platform, observers said.

Talchin's comments came in a hearing with Sun seeking a preliminary injunction that would require Microsoft to include a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) compatible with the latest addition of Java in Windows XP.

Talchin warned the court that Sun's preliminary injunction request was unprecedented and that such an injunction "has never been granted in any antitrust case."

The preliminary injunction hearing precedes a potential private antitrust trial between Sun and Microsoft. Attorneys for both companies delivered opening statements in the first day of a hearing centering on a lawsuit Sun filed against Microsoft last March.

Speaking for Sun, the plaintiff, attorney Rusty Day said that "we are here because Microsoft through a series of anticompetitive acts over many years, targeted the Java platform, and targeted its principal distribution arm."

Microsoft, Day alleged, "distributed incomplete run times and incomplete tools that fragment the Java platform."

Day said that the injunction Sun is seeking "will not prevent Microsoft from improving .Net, from bundling .Net with Internet Explorer, nor from benefiting" from the work of developers writing applications for .Net.

Rather, Day said, "the injunction would merely offset a portion of the competitive advantage" Microsoft gained through anticompetitive actions it was found to have committed by two courts--the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Virtually all of the world's PCs already contain a JVM, Talchin said. "Sun doesn't tell you they expect to have dominance also in PDAs and cell phones and application servers," he added. The Java language is designed to allow solution providers and developers to write an application once and run it on any operating system platform.

Sun's real intent, Talchin said, was to co-opt .Net's potential market share before substantial .Net development has even gotten under way. ".Net is just getting started," he said.