One of the most dramatic allegations to arise from the ongoing "Redmond Justice" trial was made by Apple's own Avie Tevanian, who claims that Microsoft intentionally introduced bugs (in the form of bogus alert messages) into Windows in order to persuade customers to disable QuickTime and switch back to ActiveMovie, Microsoft's competing media system. Avie's written testimony even included a screenshot of one of those error messages, which certainly seems suspicious: "Some of the file types usually associated with ActiveMovie are currently associated with other programs. Because of this, you may be unable to play certain types of multimedia files. Do you want to fix this (by restoring the file types to ActiveMovie)?" Hmmm.

However, a new wrinkle popped up today, as Microsoft issued a press release claiming that the bugs are not in Windows, but are actually in QuickTime itself. According to Microsoft, their new evidence "definitively" proves that "QuickTime's failures when running on Windows are in fact caused by programming errors made by Apple, not Microsoft." They further claim that this has now been confirmed by an independent software testing lab named Mindcraft, who has posted a web page describing Apple's errors, and links to a fix. Apparently the problem is that the QuickTime plug-in for Windows doesn't properly initialize certain software variables for three of eleven supported file types. Whoops!

When last we checked, Apple hadn't publicly responded to this news, but we bet their public relations folks aren't getting much sleep. The Justice Department might be doing a little tossing and turning, as well. After all, Avie's testimony against Microsoft might well have been the most damaging so far, but all that stuff about "knifing the baby" and "if you want Office 98 you'd better publicly endorse Internet Explorer" might just fall by the wayside as everyone focuses on the alleged bugs in QuickTime. We have to hand it to Microsoft-- they are certainly masters of misdirection and timing. Isn't it interesting that the data about the QuickTime bugs seems to have been released just after Avie stepped down from the stand, so he couldn't address the issue in court? If one were truly the suspicious type, one might even suspect that this whole distraction was planned from the beginning-- but no one's that paranoid, right?