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Judge says "hand-held, wireless evidence against Microsoft is valid"

Microsoft has argued that the only evidence which counts, in deciding its punishment for unfair competition against Netscape, is what happened with Netscape. Not so, said Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. And Palm Computing is now able to offer its own evidence.

Associated Press reports that an executive of handheld computer maker Palm says: "Microsoft has attempted to block Palm's development by holding back access to development tools" - and that Palm would benefit from the remedies that nine states want to impose on Microsoft for antitrust violations.

Vice-president Michael Mace "is a key witness in the states' efforts to show that the penalties they seek — which include Microsoft's disclosure of technical information to software developers — should apply to many emerging technologies rather than just the desktop operating system market," reports D. Ian Hopper, an AP technology writer.

The judge seems to take the view that there's an important distinction to be drawn between how the evidence is viewed. Allegations of wrong-doing, she indicated, are not relevant to the question of Microsoft's guilt or innocence in the original anti-trust case.

However, they may nonetheless be useful as a guide to what sort of remedies would actually work, and prevent Microsoft from repeating the pattern of behaviour that took it to Federal Court in the first place.

Key evidence now pends relating to Windows CE and derivative hand-held and phone and wireless PDA software. The "nine states" will argue that unless the remedy covers this operating system, then Microsoft is not specifically prohibited from favouring its own devices inside its desktop and server platforms.

Microsoft has already been quite frank about its own intentions in this. It says that its .Net framework "makes things easier for the system designer, if they know that there's a .Net framework also running on the remote hand-held device."

Rival designing software for hand-held, wireless and other mobile devices say that Microsoft must support all devices equally in the Windows operating system, and not make life harder for competing platforms like Java or Symbian or Palm.