Yikes! We bet Microsoft is wishing that all intra-office correspondence had been communicated telepathically in the past several years. The Justice Department's antitrust case, filed last Monday, alleges that the software giant undertook to eliminate its competition in the internet browser market by piggybacking on its virtual monopoly in the desktop OS market. The really interesting thing is that the filing apparently contains lots of quotes from Microsoft employees, culled from subpoenaed email messages and memos, which show quite plainly that Microsoft's business strategy seems to be to destroy all competitors and reign supreme.

Microsoft's long-standing claim that Internet Explorer was always intended as an integrated function in Windows 95 doesn't seem to fit with a statement from the Windows product manager, who said, "It seems clear that it will be very hard to increase browser market share on the merits of IE 4 alone. It will be more important to leverage the OS asset to make people use IE instead of Navigator." Oops... shoulda burned that memo after reading it, guys. Then there's the Windows marketing director, who told his lackeys to make it "difficult" for IE 4.0 users to switch to Navigator. Hmmm. For a larger list of fun Microsoft quotes, including ones showing that they planned to kill Java's potential by spreading "polluted" versions, take a look at this InfoWorld Electric article.

Just reading all these quotes is enough to make us want to take a shower. Still, no matter how slimy the statements sound in the context of an antitrust lawsuit, we at AtAT have to admit that it's more than likely that the same kind of stuff happens in the day-to-day activities of big corporations all over the world. That doesn't make it right, nor does that mean that these statements aren't fairly damning evidence that Microsoft did exactly what Justice alleges they did: they used their existing monopoly in the desktop OS market to try to force Netscape out of the browser market. As to whether or not Justice can make those charges stick, well, we'll all just have to stay tuned on that one.

It looks like Apple can enjoy its uncontested performance lead in the laptop market for quite a while, now. O'Grady's PowerPage mentions a TechWeb article about how Intel has cancelled the mobile version of its upcoming Katmai processor. That means the fastest Wintel laptops will continue to run on the mobile version of the Pentium II-- which is slower than the desktop version of that processor, and significantly slower than the G3-- until the mobile Coppermine chip is ready. Coppermine is scheduled for release in September of next year.

What that means, of course, is that even if PowerPC development stopped today and Apple continued to sell the existing PowerBook G3's for the next sixteen months, nothing in the Wintel laptop world will be able to touch them for pure performance. Of course, PowerPC development does continue, and Apple's readying a 400 MHz PowerBook G3 for release shortly. Beyond that, we expect to see 500 MHz G3 PowerBooks, perhaps with copper technology, possibly as early as a year from now. Apple once commanded the laptop market with the PowerBook; now it seems that they're poised to do it again.

Intel also has a low-cost mobile chip variant, called Dixon, slated for release this fall or winter, which is based on the Celeron processor. We don't know how Dixon will compare in performance to the existing G3's, but we're pretty sure the G3's will win hands down. The price, however, may be a different matter; the Dixon appears to be headed for cheap laptops that may appeal to students and home users. Can Apple's consumer portable (rumored to be based on the eMate form factor and expected in early 1999) prevail?

Speaking of PowerBooks, we continue to mess with a PowerBook G3/233, and it continues to impress the heck out of us. More importantly, though, it continues to impress PC users-- at least, in our experience. In the process of getting this thing set up with the required software, network configurations, etc., we're seeing the sleek new laptop act as a magnet that draw an incredible amount of attention among Mac users and PC users alike. The upshot is this: in addition to being a great laptop, the PowerBook G3 is a portable evangelism machine, especially when Virtual PC is installed.

We tried sticking this thing in front of a few PC users in the office and showing them some of the nicer features, like the extraordinarily crisp 13.3" 1024x768 screen, the full-size and super-comfortable keyboard, the enormous palm rests, the surprisingly good stereo speakers, etc. Everyone agrees that the PowerBook G3 is a marvel of industrial design. When we fired up Virtual PC to show them that even the slowest Powerbook G3 is fast enough to do decent Windows emulation for productivity tasks, things got really interesting. One Wintel laptop user played with it for a bit, then stated that he's now definitely going to get a Mac at home, since the only reason he's still struggling with registry corruption and IRQ conflicts on his PC is because of a single Windows-only program he needs to run, and Virtual PC takes care of that. Another person who bought a Pentium-based system a couple of months ago took a look at Virtual PC on the PowerBook and plainly announced that, had he known that emulation was so fast, he would have bought a Mac instead. Still a third mentioned that the Windows performance in Virtual PC seemed faster than on his Pentium 133 at home, and he was now seriously considering a Mac to replace it-- especially once I mentioned that even the $1299 iMac would likely run Virtual PC even faster, due to the backside cache on the processor, and then blew his socks off by showing what the G3 could do with native Mac software by firing up the Myth: The Fallen Lords demo.

If Apple really wants to make a bold move to increase market share, they should come up with some program by which Mac evangelists could have easier access to the new PowerBooks-- some kind of price reduction, or a bonus system by which each Mac sale inspired by an evangelist demo would generate points towards free equipment, or something-- because in a day of just setting up and testing one of these gorgeous machines, we've gotten three PC users to consider switching platforms. Alas, most Mac users are probably not going to have access to a PowerBook G3 for a while, but at the very least you may want to try one out when Apple's Summer User Group Tour comes to town. Go check out the new PowerBooks and get a sneak preview of the iMac. And remember to drag along a PC-using friend.