Andrew Cringely is wondering whether Microsoft lied to the Department of Justice during their big antitrust trial.

"This week, the news from recently unsealed court documents is that Microsoft may have deliberately lied not only to Burst, but also to the other anti-trust litigants right up to and including the U.S. Department of Justice.

You will find the two relevant unsealed documents in their entirety in this week's list of links. I'm going to characterize them here, but please read the documents for yourself. One thing to keep in mind here is that documents are unsealed when the judge decides that it is more important for the public to know what is in them than to not know, so Judge Motz, too, thinks this is worth your time. By the way, this is probably the first time these documents have been broadly released, so if you read them, your friends won't know what you are talking about. That may change if some big news organization gets smart and picks up the story.

One huge issue in Burst v. Microsoft is missing e-mails that should have appeared in the discovery portion of the case, but didn't. Burst knows there are lost messages because many of them were to and from Burst, itself, so they have their copies. But not only are the known messages lost from Microsoft's e-mail archive, so are any messages on the same subject that may have been sent between the Microsoft people, themselves, and not shared with Burst -- messages that Burst only believes to exist, but it's a pretty fair assumption that some such mail did happen. I have written about this before, and it plays back to a haphazard corporate e-mail retention policy at Microsoft that seems to conveniently lose any damning evidence."

You'll find the Burst documents referred to at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/links/burstbrief_1.pdf
And
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/links/burstbrief_2.pdf