"Microsoft will either have to withdraw Windows or put out versions of the product that probably won"t work". Bill Gates testified at the antitrust trial yesterday.
Furthermore, if I Microsoft employee had an idea, they"d be in contempt of court if they didn"t immediately pass it on to the major PC companies. Oh yes, and Microsoft would disintegrate. Bill, poised, sophisticated, in a dark suit with a light blue shirt (as the fashion correspondents tell us) was delivering the full-on Armageddon scenario, and not mumbling or being evasive once (outrageous, insufferably literal, yes). The pull out or ship broken product argument is fairly easy to follow, and has a kind of perverted merit. In his written testimony he said: ""Given the interdependencies among parts of Windows, and the complexity of the product, there is no clear dividing line between where a particular block ends and the operating system begins."
This is no more than the truth, although as we all know Microsoft has engineered a fair bit of this deliberately in order to make it difficult for them to be disentangled. But questioned about the DoJ settlement Gates conceded that the company is working on identifying where the boundaries between operating system and applications lie. The States" attorney"s point here was that if Microsoft could do this for the DoJ, why not the States?