The Microsoft Case

In the October 1998 a civil antitrust actions, alleging violations of the Sherman Act and various state statutes by the defendant Microsoft Corporation, were brought to Court: one of the most important lawsuits in antitrust story was beginning.
The United States Department of Justice has charged Microsoft Corporation with anti-competitive practices including illegal "tying" of the Internet Explorer Web browser with the Windows operating system.
Microsoft Corporation is the leading supplier of operating systems for PCs. The company transacts business in all fifty of the United States and in most countries around the world.
Most of its success came in 1981, when Microsoft released the first version of its Microsoft Disk Operating System, commonly known as "MS-DOS." The system had a character-based user interface that required the user to type specific instructions at a command prompt in order to perform tasks such as launching applications and copying files. When the International Business Machines Corporation ("IBM") selected MS-DOS for pre-installation on its first generation of PCs, Microsoft's product became the predominant operating system sold for Intel-compatible PCs.
In 1985 Microsoft began shipping a software package called Windows. The product included a graphic user interface, which enabled users to perform tasks by selecting icons and words on the screen using a mouse. Although originally just a user-interface, or "shell," sitting on top of MS-DOS, Windows took on more operating-system functionality over time.
MS-DOS went definitively into retirement in 1995, when Microsoft introduced the new version of Windows, Windows 95, that enjoyed a great popularity with consumers.
In June 1998, Microsoft released its successor, Windows 98.
In December 1994 Netscape Communications Corporation began to sell the first graphic browser distributed for profit, called Navigator.
Microsoft’s response came in July 1995, introducing its own browser, called Internet Explorer.
Then, in October 1998, the lawsuit and the subsequent charge of antitrust violations to the detriment of Microsoft Corporation.
In this paper I will examine how the Court reached this conclusion. I will do this through the analysis of two main documents:
1) District Court Judge Jackson’s Finding of Facts (F.F.) containing the facts that the Court finds to have been proved by conclusive evidence;
2) Department of Justice Conclusion of Law (C.L.) containing the legal consequences of the facts listed under F.F.