Katie, AtAT's resident Fact Checker and Goddess of Minutiae, came across an interesting fact while reading up on the big Microsoft-Justice showdown. Most of you, like us, were aware that both sides of the conflict had reached a temporary truce last Thursday; Justice and the states agreed to hold off on filing suit, and Microsoft agreed to postpone its shipment of Windows 98 to manufacturers. The goal was to meet and negotiate last Friday, in an attempt to come to a mutually amicable agreement that would avoid costly and bothersome litigation. On Saturday, of course, talks broke down, and Windows 98 shipped last Monday, even as the government filed its antitrust suits.

So much for the recap. The detail about last Friday's meeting that was missing from most accounts was this: Friday's talks got off to a terrifically bad start. The government representatives showed up to antitrust chief Joel Klein's offices for the "intensive meeting" at the appointed time, and sat there twiddling their thumbs because the Microsoft team never showed up. After half an hour, a staff aide came in to tell them that Microsoft thought the meeting was supposed to be at their law firm's offices. This little tidbit was apparently reported in the New York Times coverage of the event, though it was missing from the Washington Post's. A Boston Globe article discusses the misunderstanding in more detail, though it cautions that the whole incident may have been a government-manufactured anecdote to help their side. (We love it when the mainstream press are even more paranoid than we are!)

Now as for whether that misunderstanding was a misunderstanding or something else entirely is a matter of conjecture; Microsoft's arrogance throughout the whole DoJ ordeal has been astounding. It seems impossible that Microsoft's expensive lawyers could have misunderstood the location of such an important meeting; likewise, though, it seems unlikely that even a giant such as Microsoft would deliberately snub the federal government at a crucial point in the negotiations. But even if it was all just a misunderstanding, to the feds, it revealed at the very least just how little Microsoft seemed to care about the whole issue at hand. As one of the government representatives apparently stated when he was told why Microsoft was a no-show, "Microsoft executives assume that the world will come to them."