Amazon.com Review
It had all the elements of a
Perry Mason television drama: big, powerful protagonists; shady witnesses; carefully argued points of law; leading players we loved to hate; rabbit-out-of-the-hat revelations; an irascible judge. And for much of the late 1990s, it held our attention (if not always our comprehension) like a flickering computer monitor. U.S. v. Microsoft, the nation's biggest antitrust trial since the breakup of Ma Bell almost 20 years earlier, played itself out before us in many fascinating ways. Whether you were a techno-geek who spent his off-hours tinkering with the Windows registry for relaxation, a state attorney-general concerned about the near-total dominance of the Windows operating system for the world's PCs, a student of the human character, a corporate PR counsel, a manager at a dot-com, or just someone who wondered why her PC seemed to crash more times than a Ford Pinto, there was something in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft for you.
Now, two journalists have produced an eyewitness account of this landmark trial. Joel Brinkley and Steve Lohr covered the story for The New York Times from the beginning. Given that, this book is likely to become the definitive work on the case for the general reader. Brinkley and Lohr pull together a comprehensive chronology of the events that led up to the trial and the judge's proposed remedy: the breakup of the world's largest, richest, and most powerful software company. They frame their reportage (much of which is reproduced from their Times news stories) with fresh commentary and analysis of key events and biographical portraits of the players on both sides. It's all here: the damning internal e-mail messages, the botched technical demonstrations used to counter the government's proposed remedies, Microsoft's competitors twisting the knife on the witness stand, the infamous videotape presentation before the court by Bill Gates, Judge Jackson's incredulity at some of the testimony.
And while the final verdict may yet be years away, the case of U.S. v. Microsoft will provide many salutary lessons for both governments and large companies--many of which in the high-tech world are growing bigger every day. --Alan J. White
From Publishers Weekly
The federal government's antitrust lawsuit against the world's best-known software maker created headlines and sound bites all over the world. Journalists Brinkley and Lohr, who covered the case for the New York Times, offer a giant, information-packed survey of the case's ups and downs so far, along with analyses of its prehistory and profiles of the main players and witnesses, among them Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson and the government's star lawyer, David Boies. Six chapters take the controversy from 1995 (when Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein joined the Justice Department and started looking at Microsoft's behavior) to 1998 (when the lawsuit was filed) and up to the present. While the bulk of each chapter consists of reprinted Times articles on the trial, each with the date on which it ran, a new and detailed essay explaining part of the case, often relying on new interviews, opens each chapter and new summaries and explanations are interspersed as well. Seven new paragraphs about AOL and its senior v-p, David Colburn, introduce two articles about his testimony in October 1999. Next comes a short new essay about some lawyers' unfamiliarity with computers, a quick (new) intro to an Apple exec and then a longer (reprinted) article about his testimony. The case itself is currently hanging fire as Bill Gates and his allies appeal Judge Jackson's far-reaching order to break up the company. When it's all over, other writers, media critics, techies and legal experts will no doubt weigh in with more analytical books on the topic. This volume, though necessarily repetitive, will remain an invaluable source for those who want to study the court case and its public reception as it unfolded day by day. (One-day laydown, Aug. 21)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
