"Redmond Justice" continues to prove that it's your best antitrust courtroom drama value for the money. On its first day back on the air, we long-suffering fans were treated to the same level of blunt contradiction in the rebuttal testimony that made the original witness series such a huge ratings success, as one MIT economist flatly rejected another's claims as "confused," "muddled," and "simply wrong." Franklin Fisher's second day on the stand was no less entertaining, as he stood up to cross-examination by Microsoft attorney Michael Lacovara, who tried to counter Fisher's claims of a Microsoft-held monopoly by pointing out possible future competition by handheld organizers like the Palm and next-generation game consoles like the upcoming PlayStation 2000. A Wired article has the juicy details.

Of particular note, though, is the way that Lacovara's assertion apparently directly contradicts Chairman Gates' own publicly written words; when faced with the claim that non-PC information appliances might someday give the PC market a run for its money, Fisher pointed out that none other than Bill Gates himself apparently disagreed. In a Newsweek article penned by Lacovara's ultimate boss in this matter, Gates wrote that "predicting the imminent demise of the personal computer has become an annual ritual" and revealed that "over 100 million PCs will be sold this year"-- almost as many units as color TVs. Whoops! So Lacovara was forced into the uncomfortable position of having to discredit his boss' own words, by implying that Gates' public statements were not "consistent with what people in the industry are saying." Hope you weren't counting on a big Christmas bonus this year, Mike; contradicting the boss in front of the whole world probably isn't high on the "How To Suck Up For Fun And Profit" list.

The whole deliciously embarrassing incident led government attorney David Boies, ever the wit, to quip, "Microsoft's lawyers are now having to disavow not only what the testimony of the industry experts has been, not only what the uniform testimony of the witnesses has been, not only what their internal documents say, but even the contemporaneous statements of their chairman." Zing! Point: Boies. And even ignoring Gates' article, how can you not love a company whose central argument that it holds no monopoly is that someday it might face competition from other products? Yeah, and we're all millionaires because someday we might win the lottery...