And yet there is still cause for wriggling unease which, with fairness, he expresses well. This, in essence, was the war of the Netscape browser. The customer was not complaining. Netscape was complaining, but hardly going broke - and, tellingly, would surely have used exactly the same tactics if situations had been reversed. But there is, at least, a problem matching petroleum pipelines to the infinite channels of the net.
Technology is a little like mercury.
They have all faded from the front row, victims of a fleeting hegemony. That, surely, was the perception that haunted Microsoft, an arrogance born of desperate insecurity. And among those names, perhaps IBM is the most telling of the lot - a company that underwent its own antitrust trial by fire and, through those flames, lost momentum. Watch Microsoft, perhaps, go the same way. He is less good at trawling through the endless, essentially repetitive days in court or goggling at the silken skills of David Boies, the lawyer Justice hired before Al Gore hung his first chad.