Interview with Carlo Piana

Was there some problematic behavior from MS that you noticed during the processes? Some non-official information says that MS spent US$3.6 billion on several actions related to this case. Any comment?

That was another arm of Microsoft strategy. Divide et impera.

It all started with Sun, the initial complainant. It received quite a treat to jump off the case, something in the range of US$2 billion. That was even before the court case started. The same happened later with Novell and CCIA, shortly after the "interim measure" case, during fall 2004. Notably, it was before the President issued the final order in that part of the case. And it happened again shortly before the main hearing last year, with Real Networks. That was even sleazier, because it had as a consequence that all the written documents submitted by Real as pleadings and evidence were taken off the court file. At that point the written phase was over and the evidence we were relying upon disappeared.

I don't know what is the final figure of this, but surely is over US$3 billion, in cash or services.

Are there any notes about 5-day hearing from April 2006? There wasn't much info about it and both sides were quite quiet about that.

The five-day hearing last year was huge. All numbers were impressive. The "grande salle", the big hearing room at the Court of Justice, was half packed with the representatives of the parties and of the interveners only. The press had to be accommodated in a separate room. Thirteen judges were sitting on the bench, which was unprecedented for the Court of First Instance.

Why did the European Court wait so long to make a decision?

Indeed, it was a long decision. However, one must consider that it was a case of an unprecedented complexity and importance, therefore a high duty of care was imposed on them. I believe that now the Commission is going to review its internal process to make it more expedite, a decision, whatever it is, must be reached in months, not years, because the market moves too fast.

The events were perhaps not so exciting as one would expect in a courtroom movie. However, for those conversant with the case, it was quite eventful. Starting with a surprise argument of Microsoft, which invented a new theory to support its case, the infamous "blue bubble".

The claim that the computer were "tightly coupled" and therefore there was no way to plug in a replacement server in the network was largely destroyed at that time, so, in order to salvage at least part of it, they said that the coupling happened not across all the network, but among those servers which run the Active Directory replication services, in other words, those servers at the top of the pyramid. Those servers need to keep a complete copy of the authentication and authorization database, which must be efficiently replicated over whatever bandwidth available.

The algorithm of that replication, including what to do if one server goes down and cannot relay the replication, are allegedly of such a peculiar nature that there is no way other than replicating the internal behaviour of them to make them work together. In other words, according to this funny theory, the messages that go through the wires are not sufficient to decide what is the correct behaviour of any servers, they must agree on a particular behaviour without speaking, according to a very secret algorithm. Therefore, there is no other way to replace a Windows server in the blue bubble if not cloning, in the strictest meaning of the word, a Windows server.