WASHINGTON -- When the Clinton administration accused Microsoft of myriad antitrust wrongdoings in a 1997 lawsuit, the company appeared to have been taken by surprise.
Top Microsoft executives confessed at the time that they underestimated competitors' abilities to convince Justice Department lawyers to start a legal struggle that culminated in a breakup order, and an appeal that's still under way.
Four years later, Microsoft's enemies are wagging fingers once again, pointing at the company's ambitious plans for .NET, the launch of Office XP on Thursday, and the scheduled introduction of Windows XP on Oct. 25 as additional examples of Microsoft's attempts to maintain its operating system monopoly.
This time, however, Microsoft and its allies don't view the threats as idle ones. Since the 1997 antitrust case began, Microsoft has dramatically expanded its Washington presence, moving its lobbying office downtown and hiring dozens more lobbyists and lawyers.
On Wednesday, two groups and one attorney who receive money from Microsoft -- the Association for Competitive Technology, the Computing Technology Industry Association, and conservative superlawyer C. Boyden Gray -- organized a conference call to deny allegations of Microsoft wrongdoing.
"By creating a PR war, by trying to do lobbying in Congress, by trying to get products prevented from being shipped, these are all efforts to prevent Microsoft from entering the marketplace," said Jonathan Zuck, president of ACT.
"These companies have come to realize it's more important to be spending their money on lobbying and PR than in the technological marketplace," Zuck said.
The companies he's talking about belong to ACT's chief opponent, a group called ProComp funded by Oracle and Sun, among other firms, which exists for one reason: attempting to rein in Microsoft.
In the last month, ProComp has published two reports that accuse Microsoft of continued antitrust wrongdoing and, in the kind of muted invitation typical of policy debates, ask the Justice Department and states' attorneys general to step in.
On page 3 of the May 15 white paper (PDF file), ProComp warns of "Microsoft's control of the Internet." The paper includes such lines as: "Microsoft's related initiatives on .NET, Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6.0, Windows Media Player 8.0, MSN Messenger, MSN Explorer and HailStorm require the immediate attention of antitrust authorities and policy makers."
Page 36 is even more explicit: "Rarely do antitrust enforcement authorities and policy makers have an opportunity to apply the law with an eye toward protecting markets before the damage is done."
Mike Pettit, head of ProComp, denies he's making lobbying visits to Capitol Hill -- say, to the Democrats who soon will head the Senate Judiciary committee -- but says he wouldn't be surprised if that's "ultimately" where his efforts take him.
Right now, however, Pettit says he's still focused on the existing antitrust case. In February, an appeals court indicated that they might send the case back to U.S. District Judge Thomas Jackson -- or, because of Jackson's out-of-court comments about Microsoft, to a new judge for an entirely new trial.
Pettit hopes that enough of Jackson's ruling will stay intact to justify severe remedies, even if the breakup order doesn't stand.
"Under any scenario where the liability isn't 100 percent overturned, there's going to be some kind of remedy proceeding," Pettit says. "Is this specifically to ask them to file a separate lawsuit? No. It's to ask them to stay on top of things and take this into consideration during a remedy phase."
"Will we be talking with the state enforcement officials about these (products), trying to understand them as they roll out?" asks Pettit. "The states and the DoJ? Sure."
ACT's own white paper (PDF file) released Wednesday calls ProComp's complaints about Windows XP and Windows Media Player 8 "utterly baseless," saying that Sun and Oracle integrate new features into their operating systems and Microsoft should have the same privilege.
As for Microsoft's still-evolving .NET strategy, ACT calls it the next step in the evolution of operating systems, likening it to adding a graphical interface to DOS in the 1980s and saying it should be equally permissible.
While the principles may be important, both sides seem to recognize that a war of attrition through white papers can grow tiresome surprisingly quickly.
Admits Gray, a Microsoft supporter: "The white papers only succeed to the extent they're given credence. We're only responding because we want to make sure they're not taken seriously by your readership."
