Meanwhile, in "Redmond Justice," the trial has come around to retreading some very old ground-- namely, the question of whether Internet Explorer is an application, or an integrated component of the Windows operating system. The government's next witness is Dr. Edward Felton, a computer scientist from Princeton, who testifies that, yes, he had considerably more trouble uninstalling the latest version of IE from Windows than he encountered when uninstalling earlier versions. However, "with the help of two young assistants" (does anyone else immediately think of a magic act and two Vegas-style women covered in sequins?) he was able to remove IE4 from Windows 98. Read all about it in the Industry Standard.

Felton's method of removal is decidedly sketchy: basically, it doesn't sound like it really removes IE4's code, but rather eliminates any access to the program for the end user. Felton strips out the desktop icon that launches IE and any executables that call the program, and also makes changes to the Windows Registry so that HTML files and the like won't automatically be opened in IE. (Sounds pretty much like telling Internet Config or the Internet control panel to use, say, Navigator instead of IE-- only much hairier.) Microsoft, predictably, points out that Felton's method hasn't really removed anything, only crippled it-- and even if he were able to remove IE4, it would prove nothing. "You can surgically remove someone's right arm, but the arm was certainly a useful part of the person's body before it was removed," they argue.

By the same token, though, just because a telephone is a useful object, surgically attaching one to someone's head doesn't necessarily make it a necessary and unremoveable integrated communications system. It was certainly a useful device before it was attached. Some of you might feel otherwise, but we're perfectly happy being able to use whatever phone we want, whether it's a cellular flip-phone or a dancing Elvis phone-- and if a better phone comes out tomorrow, we're happy that we we can go out and buy it without having a phone we don't want to use still surgically attached to our heads. I can definitely say this: I've been using Windows 98 with the "integrated" IE4 for three days, now, and I see absolutely no benefits that it offers over having whatever browser application I want to use installed on my Mac and set up in the Internet control panel. There's little doubt that IE is "integrated" far more than any other application, but as far as we're concerned, it's quite clearly a case of forced integration for market share's sake, and not for any customer benefit.