A Tourists Guide To a Big Tech Antitrust Trial

What it was like inside the 1998 courtroom where Microsoft lost

The news today is that Google was found by a federal judge to be an illegal monopoly. The case and the ruling have echoes back to the late 1990s, when Microsoft similarly got busted by the Justice Department.

I covered that Microsoft trial. And while I was there to watch for actual news, I thought readers would like to know what it was like on the scene. Below is the column I wrote for USA Today, which went out on the wires and appeared in many regional newspapers. The clip here is from The Olympian in Olympia, Wash., dated Nov. 30, 1998, as found on Newspapers.com.

For what it’s worth, after the column appeared, I got an email from Intel CEO Andy Grove. It just said, “This is funny.” He signed it, “Mad Puppy.” You’ll get the joke once you read the column.