Agentless Backup is Not a Myth

Microsoft senior VP Jim Allchin retreated in disorder yesterday as the case of the edited video rattled through the courtroom. Government attorney David Boies had forced an admission by Allchin that Microsoft's video demonstration had been tampered with DoJ skewers exec over falsified video, and then proceeded to use this to undermine the exec's evidence. In his deposition last week Allchin had written that the machines used in his video demonstration had been "virgin machines." The video, unfortunately, showed that they had not been. Allchin still insisted that the points he had made were valid, but his evidence now seems fatally flawed. The demo was intended to show that after using the Internet Explorer uninstall program produced by DoJ witness Edward Felten, the performance of Windows 98 was severely degraded. One of the machines shown, however, was clearly not "virgin." It showed - woops - a Microsoft Office taskbar, and Boies also showed that changes had been made in the registry. Based on this, the Microsoft test was clearly unscientific. It would also appear to have been the case that the machine shown performing badly on the video in its attempts to access the Windows Update site was, er, the one that hadn't had Felten's program run on it. The events in court yesterday morning seem to have triggered a Microsoft investigation. By the afternoon the company was saying that its video demo hadn't been faulty, and that the discrepancy affected only a small part of a very long tape. General counsel Bill Neukom insisted it didn't change the results of the test. Boies, triumphant, charitably said the tape wasa clearly unreliable, but that he didn't think Microsoft had deliberately fudged it. ® Complete Register trial coverage

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