According to a Philadelphia Enquirer article, Microsoft continues to accumulate some high-profile enemies in the antitrust war. Their latest celebrity detractors include Robert Bork (whom you may remember from his Supreme Court nomination several years back) and former senator Bob Dole. Chalk up two more Washington personalities (yes, we use the term indiscriminately) to jump on the anti-Microsoft bandwagon.

Interestingly, both of these new additions to the Justice Department's side represent changes of view. Bork, who is an antitrust law expert, has apparently long championed the idea that a company can monopolize a particular industry without actually hurting consumers-- though now he claims that Microsoft has overstepped their bounds; he advocates a "broader case" against the software company and their "predatory practices" by the DoJ. And Dole, who, just three years ago, said the DoJ was being too hard on Microsoft, now feels that they are "doing the right thing" with their investigation.

Of course, Bork and Dole have more in common than just their dislike of Microsoft's business practices. Both are big-time governmental losers, in a very narrow sense: despite the nomination, Bork never made it onto the Supreme Court, and in the last Presidential race, Dole never made it into the White House. We at AtAT are not entirely sure that that fact is a harbinger of doom for the antitrust battlers, but it's definitely at least noteworthy. Still, it's nice to see these guys keeping busy.

AtAT's received several worried queries from faithful viewers who wanted to know if the new 400 MHz Pentium II processor eliminates the current PowerPC performance lead. The answer, of course, depends on your point of view. Apple's "up to twice as fast" campaign is based on Byte Magazine's Bytemark benchmark, which seems to imply that Intel will have to come up with at least a 600 MHz Pentium II before things start to even up.

Of course, benchmarks often have little or nothing to do with real-world performance, which is why Steve Jobs gave a side-to-side Photoshop demo at his Seybold keynote. That demo showed a 266 MHz G3 system slightly outpacing a 333 MHz Pentium II system from Compaq. The 300 MHz G3 system beat the Compaq by a pretty hefty margin. And in an update to the Photoshop tests, PC Week just announced that the G3/300 still beats the PII/400, both in graphics performance and in Microsoft Office tasks.

Photoshop performance may or may not have any relation to what you personally use computers to accomplish, but hearing PC Week say that the G3 wins even at Office tasks is a pretty good indication that among currently-shipping systems, the G3 maintains its lead. Personally, we got to install Office 98 on a G3/266 last week, and we clocked Word 98's launch time at 3.34 seconds. Pretty darn impressive, at least in our opinion. (Not that anyone's going to rush out and buy a G3/300 just to do light word processing, but what the heck.)

Following Intuit's recent announcement that they are halting further development of Quicken for the Macintosh, we've received a ton of feedback from faithful viewers with varying perspectives on the issue. Most claimed that Quicken is so bug-ridden, it's no wonder sales are down. Others stated quite simply that Quicken is a "killer app," and losing it on the Mac side is a serious blow to the platform.

Since we at AtAT don't use Quicken, we don't personally bemoan its fate, though the implications for the Mac platform do worry us a bit. What we find particularly interesting, though, is how Intuit claimed as recently as three months ago that Quicken was "selling like hotcakes," but now justifies its move to cease development by pointing to three years of declining sales. (MacNN has a Quicktime movie from MacWorld Expo SF '98 which contains the "hotcakes" reference.)

So whom are we to believe-- Intuit from three months ago, or Intuit today? What are the real reasons behind the shelving of Mac Quicken? Who stood to gain? And what happened to the missing 18 frames from that Quicktime footage? You want the truth? You can't handle the truth. Whoops, time for our medication... more on this as it develops.