Microsoft attorney Dan Webb yesterday engaged in the somewhat redundant exercise of trying to prove that former Intel exec and trial star witness Steve McGeady was biased against Microsoft. This is about as difficult as trying to prove the Pope"s Polish, and Microsoft really should not be paying Dan wages for this kind of stuff.
Earlier in the trial McGeady contributed evidence regarding Microsoft"s (pretty successful) efforts to squeeze Intel out of software, and collected unofficial approval from Andy Grove, who appeared to take the attitude that "his testimony is nothing to do with Intel, but the boy done good." Since then he"s been doing interviews with Wired and writing books, wherein he describes Microsoft as evil. And he"s also made jokes about Microsoft execs being cannibals.
Queried by Webb on these and other matters, McGeady simply responded that he"d said all sorts of things "that should probably have gotten my mouth washed out with soap." Why this has not happened to the man many times already is quite beyond us, but he added that he likes many of the people he knows at Microsoft, and was entirely unabashed.
The difficulty with McGeady will be that although he clearly does (with some reason) have a major downer on Microsoft"s behaviour, he also has a great deal of useful information about that behaviour, and claims of bias probably won"t be sufficient to get it all tossed out.