Microsoft Attorney Attempts To Discredit Economist

Microsoft

Monday's testimony came on the day Microsoft had been expected to call its first witness. But by midday Microsoft's attorney said he would not call his first witness Monday.

Microsoft attorney Michael Lacovara pointed out that University of California at Berkeley Professor Carl Shapiro had stated in his written testimony that the relative lack of applications for Apple's Macintosh operating system was one reason its market share is significantly lower than that of Windows.

"But Office and Internet Explorer are available today on Macintosh," Lacovara countered. Since Apple is not likely to enter the marketplace for operating systems that run on Intel microprocessors, the lack of additional applications is not, as Shapiro had written, a "barrier of entry," Lacovara said.

Shapiro countered that he "stands by the view that Macintosh could become a stronger substitute" for Windows if the number of applications available for Windows were also available for the Macintosh.

Shapiro, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General for Economics in the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, is now a senior consultant with Charles River Associates, a Cambridge, Mass. economic consulting company.

Under the states' proposed remedy, Microsoft would make code for Windows and various applications, including Internet Explorer, publically available for 10 years, a provision Lacovara fought to portray as harmful to Microsoft's right to control its intellectual property. By way of example, Lacovara said Netscape's move in 1998 to make its Navigator browser open source, which Netscape said at the time would promote innovation, proved disastrous.

"Some reviewers said that [open source Navigator was the worst piece of software [issued that year," Lacovara said. Lacovara then displayed for the court a portion of an article Shapiro penned for The Wall Street Journal shortly after Netscape's move to make Navigator open source. "Some see Netscape's move as an act of desperation, but we think it has a good chance of working," wrote Shapiro and co-author Hal Varian.

Today, Shapiro agrees that ultimately Netscape's move in fact "did not work out well." Shapiro also said in an interview in August 1998 that there could be "real problems" managing open-source editions of a browser.

Lacovara capitalized on this point to illustrate what Microsoft believes is a flaw in the state's recommendation to make IE code available for 10 years. "We're left with your hope that Microsoft can do a better job managing its open-source versions of IE" than Netscape did, Lacovara said to Shapiro.

Shapiro maintained that Microsoft is better positioned now than Netscape was then to manage multiple open-source versions of an IE browser.