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.