A few quotes from the story I mentioned:
"Morris' plan was to bring the Project Sherman gang to the Valley and expose them firsthand to Microsoft's influence. He turned to Gary Reback, asking him to arrange a series of hush-hush meetings with industry figures who could address the question with authority. Nothing gave Reback more kicks than a covert operation where he was pulling the strings. Within days, he had assembled a Murderer's Row of Valley executives, financiers, and technologists who would parade before Morris' group during a single daylong session. Reback told his witnesses that the meeting was important and that it might help influence the DOJ, but he told them little else; not the names of the economists and lawyers they'd be addressing, or who their fellow witnesses would be, or the identity of the meeting's sponsor. To keep the bigwigs from running into one another at Wilson Sonsini's offices, he instructed them to enter and exit through different lobbies.
The tutorial the Project Shermanites received on the appointed late-March day was wide-ranging, and, according to one person who attended, they reacted to certain parts of it with shock and amazement. They heard from Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Novell, about the vulnerability of being a firm that both competes with, and is reliant on, Microsoft software. They heard from the Apple software wizard Avie Tevanian about why conduct remedies like opening up Microsoft's APIs wouldn't accomplish anything. They heard from Sun's Bill Joy (who had no idea that his company was paying for this show) about why Tevanian was right, but why splitting Microsoft into three identical firms, the so-called Baby Bills solution, might be worse: "I keep thinking of 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.'" They heard from John Doerr about Microsoft's recent habit of gathering together the Valley's VCs and offering helpful suggestions about which technologies it might be advisable to invest in and which might be best left to Redmond. "My firm's policy is never to back a venture that competes directly with Microsoft," Doerr said. "Only damned fools stand in the way of oncoming trains."
And they heard from Jim Clark. "When I left Silicon Graphics I had a net worth of $16 million and I invested $5 million to start Netscape," Clark said. "Microsoft has practically killed Netscape. I'll never invest in another thing to compete with them. I'll never touch another market that has anything remotely to do with Microsoft's path. And if I'd known four years ago what I know now - that Microsoft would destroy us and that the government wouldn't do anything about it for three fcking years - I never would've started Netscape in the first place."
A few weeks later, Morris and a select subset of his experts (big guns plus Saloner; no Reback) flew out to Washington for their audience with the DOJ. It was now the middle of April. Four months had passed since the consent-decree case had climaxed, and Morris knew little more about where the DOJ's investigation stood than what he read in the papers. Certainly the trustbusters seemed eager to see him: Klein had called twice to try and move up the date of the presentation, and, arriving at the DOJ, Morris found himself playing to a packed house. Klein, his number two Doug Melamed, Rubinfeld, Malone, and Boies were there, along with a swarm of junior antitrust-division staffers, all crowded into the conference room next to Klein's office.
Taking seats across the table from Klein and his deputies, Morris' team proceeded to outline the case they believed the DOJ should file. Just as the Netscape white papers had argued, the core of that case was illegal monopoly maintenance and monopoly extension - a violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. For years, Microsoft had leveraged its power over the desktop to invade adjacent markets, from productivity applications to server operating systems. Sometimes those markets were tremendously valuable in their own right; Office alone raked in billions each year for Gates' company, and Microsoft's next target - the server space in which Sun was a leader - was even richer. Other times, the market itself was worth next to nothing in terms of dollars and cents, but controlling it was essential to preserving Microsoft's dominance on the desktop. Browsers were one example of this. But Java was an equally compelling one. By letting programmers write software that would run on any OS, Java threatened to render Windows irrelevant, if not obsolete. Microsoft's response had been to license Java from Sun and then violate that license by creating a Windows-only variant of the technology in an attempt to subvert its cross-platform purpose. With both Java and the browser, as Saloner put it later, Microsoft's MO was the same: "We will embrace it, we will make it ours, we will apply it to our operating system, and we will kill it. We will do what we must to protect the mothership - the OS."
The Sun presentation ran for nearly four hours. Deploying his experts to make most of the arguments - Reasoner and Sohn on the law, Carlton on the economics - Morris tried to anticipate and shoot down Microsoft's defenses. In particular, the team addressed the question of harm, of who'd been hurt by Microsoft's actions. After all, the company would say, consumers are happy; prices are falling; high tech is thriving; so is Sun, by the way. What that picture left out, however, was the damage to innovation - the products left undeveloped, the areas of technology left unexplored. For example, there was almost no R&D on operating systems anymore. What did that imply for the future of technology? And how long could innovation continue to flourish in an industry suffused with fear?
"I went out to Silicon Valley," Mike Sohn told Klein and his team. "In all my years practicing antitrust law, I have never seen such powerful people so scared. It utterly amazed me."