Jackson said he did not want to hear any further evidence,
rejecting a request by Microsoft to present more witnesses,
including Bill Gates who has not given evidence so far in the
trial.
Instead, he ordered the US Department of Justice and the 19
states taking part in the lawsuit to submit a final version of
their proposed remedy by tomorrow. He gave Microsoft 48 hours to
reply.
Microsoft’s lawyers said they will immediately appeal Jackson’s
final order, which could come next week.
Parties not directly involved in the case had filed briefs which
set out other suggestions for dealing with Microsoft. Jackson
indicated that he favoured suggestions in two of these briefs which
went further than the government's proposals.
The judge suggested that the government consider dividing
Microsoft into three companies, arguing that the government’s plan
risked creating two monopolies instead of one, which may have no
incentive to interfere with each other’s profitability. Jackson
said: “Tell me why they would compete? Tell me why they would
effectively inspire competition?”
One brief suggested splitting the company into three: one for
the Windows operating system, one for internet operations and one
for all remaining products and services.
Microsoft described the break-up plans as punitive and far
beyond what it portrayed as the limited set of anti-competitive
violations found by the judge.
The government argued that Microsoft would continue its
anti-competitive practices unless the company was broken up. As
evidence, it presented an internal e-mail by Bill Gates on how the
company could break into the personal digital assistant (PDA)
market. In the e-mail, Gates referred to making Microsoft’s
products work better with Microsoft Office than with competitor’s
products:
"We really need to demonstrate to people
like Nokia why our PDA will connect to Office in a better way than
other PDAs even if that means changing how we do flexible schema in
Outlook and how we tie some of our audio and video advanced work to
only run on our PDAs.”
