Wall Street Journal: How tenacity kept monopoly intact. In a classic display of Microsoft pugnacity, the company hammered opposing government lawyers on nearly every conceivable point, no matter how small. Eventually exhaustion became a factor, lawyers on the government side acknowledge. “It was a marathon session, and new [settlement] language that had not been there before and that had not been vetted by the staff showed up in new drafts,” one government attorney says. “The provisions were weakened at every turn by qualifying exceptions.”
Ask yourself how supposedly smart lawyers could have allowed fatigue to be “a factor,” as John Wilke’s story says. Ask yourself how those qualifying exceptions remained in the document, undermining the provisions that were supposed to spur competition and restrain a willful monopolist.
Ask yourself how the Justice Department agreed to a settlement in which the lawbreaker wasn’t even required to admit that it had done anything wrong — a position Microsoft continues to maintain despite its conviction as a serial lawbreaker, a verdict upheld unanimously by the most anti-antitrust appeals court in the land.
The putrid smell from this sellout, the true reasons for which we may never fully discover, will linger for years to come.