Hanging in the balance is the breakup order that would transform the competitive landscape in the multibillion-dollar computer industry, considered one of the driving forces of the longest economic boom in U.S. history. The government's breakup strategy depended crucially on speed, and that strategy failed today. Other antitrust and technology specialists also were divided on the impact of the delay. Microsoft competitors feared it would give the world's largest computer software maker a chance to extend its hold on the industry because it delays stringent remedies fashioned by U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in his June order breaking up the company. But others said change takes place so rapidly in the computer industry that the Justice Department could be forced to abandon its plan to break Microsoft into two competing companies, one that makes the Windows operating-system programs and another centered on software applications such as Microsoft Office.
Settlement is never out of the question.
Jackson ruled in April that Microsoft had done damage to the competitive process by using its monopoly power in personal-computer operating systems to stymie competition, stifle innovation and harm consumers. Then, in June, he accepted the government's breakup proposal. Microsoft had asked the Supreme Court not to hear the swift appeal of the government's antitrust lawsuit, arguing that the case is too complex and the facts too cumbersome to be handled by the nation's highest court on first review. The company's attorneys argued that the high court could benefit from a narrowing of the legal issues by the Court of Appeals. The Justice Department had argued that if any case were appropriate to be heard under the special law for fast appeals of antitrust rulings it was the Microsoft case.