The Microsoft antitrust trial screeched to a halt Thursday afternoon after the government attorney accused Compaq of turning proprietary information from Be Inc. over to Microsoft.
Government attorney David Boies asked John Rose, a Compaq senior vice president, whether he was aware Compaq took confidential information from Be and turned it over to Microsoft. Boies referred to a comparison between the Be OS and Windows CE, two competitive operating systems.
"I am not aware of that," Rose said.
U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson asked Boies if he had "an airtight basis" for that question. Boies answered in the affirmative.
A Compaq lawyer, who was visibly irritated with the line of questioning, asked and received a recess.
Following the recess, Jackson said he would not allow more questions regarding Be and the documents because Rose had already responded he had no knowledge of the subject.
Compaq attorney William Costen said he did not appreciate his company's name being sullied, and during the break, asked Boies the source of his information.
Boies responded he already provided the source name to Costen, who repeatedly called the entire line of questioning "a cheap trial stunt."
However, prior to the recess, Boies grilled Rose about his meetings with Microsoft executives and company chairman Bill Gates leading into this hearing.
Rose initially said he had only spoken with Microsoft vice president Paul Maritz when Maritz asked him to be a Microsoft witness, and said he had not met or spoken with other Microsoft executives recently. Rose said several times he had not discussed the lawsuit with Gates.
Boies, in what has become a pattern, then presented Rose with an e-mail message, part of a document submitted under seal, in which Gates wrote: "I thanked Rose for all his trips to Seattle and his willingness to extract a lot of time for this lawsuit."
Rose said he had only gone to Redmond, Wash., in late 1998 to discuss high-availability NT and SQL Server.
Boies also read from an internal Compaq e-mail in which a Compaq official wrote: "The Microsoft OEM business terms are indicative of what you'd expect from a monopoly."
Rose responded the employee had only been with his group for four days when he penned that message.