Microsoft Corporation began damage control Wednesday for an "inconsistency"
in a videotape which government attorney David Boies blasted during his
cross-examination the previous day. The company says that the video "does
nothing to invalidate either the tests on which the demonstration was based
or the substance of his testimony."
According to Microsoft, Allchin conducted thorough tests of a program the
purports to remove Internet Explorer. His conclusions? The program fails to
remove IE from Windows 98 and degrades the performance of the operating
system.
The problems arose when the company decided to prove this in court with
a slick videotape demonstration, which was played before Allchin took the
stand on Tuesday. Partway through the video, the title caption of a window
changes, mysteriously, from "Internet Explorer" to "Windows 98." Boies
pointed this out in frame-by-frame detail, charging that Microsoft had
doctored the video.
Flustered by the charges, Microsoft says that Allchin called members of his
technical team during lunch to discovered what happened. They told him the
following:
"The machine used to replicate Allchin's tests for the videotaping was not
one of the new machines he purchased for his tests. Apparently, one small
entry in the Windows registry on the machine that was used--an entry that
allows users to choose or change the title for a particular screen--had
apparently been deleted or left blank by another program that had been run
previously on that computer, causing it to default to the title, 'Internet
Explorer,' even though the [IE removal] program was running on the machine.
Except for that single minor inconsistency, Allchin said, the conclusions
shown on the videotape accurately represent his findings in all of the
tests he performed on the [IE removal] program.'
It sounds like a good story, but Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson wasn't
listening. When court resumed on Wednesday, Jackson berated Microsoft
attorneys for allowing the video to be shown, saying that the mistake had
essentially eroded their witness' credibility.
"This casts doubt on the credibility of the entire videotaped
demonstration," he said. "How can I rely on it if you can't tell me if it
is the same machine?"
He then attacked Allchin, who was ultimately responsible for the video.
"This is very troubling," he said. "I'd feel much better about it if you
had made the test yourself."
"I did make the test," Allchin replied.
"Yeah, but that is not what I am seeing here," Jackson retorted