It's n. p. r.'s all things considered i'm noah adams and i'm linda wertheimer microsoft and the government were back in court today for closing arguments in their landmark anti trust suit both sides used the opportunity to restate what they think they proved during the trial the justice department attorneys described microsoft as a vigilante monopolist a company that used its monopoly power to crush its competitors

Microsoft twenty two big changes in the industry changes and they said made this huge unnecessary joining us now from the u. s. district courthouse is n. p. r.'s larry abramson

Marietta that government went first this morning and it presented uh the argument that's been presenting along

That pretty much linda they appointed to have two events over the past year it really showed that microsoft is still in the driver's seat a disillusioned the dominant software company uh in the industry that are really driving and tighter and tighter

Hi tech industry understands um

Documents of bill gates saying that piece he will continue to dominate the computer landscape for years to come and visit to counteract arkansas

I think that there are a lot of threats to its dominance out there from a palm top computing systems to a new operating system called clinics the government also um tried to reinforce the notion of microsoft's power in the marketplace they said that microsoft has a ninety percent share of the operating system business throughout the entire nineteen nineties and the markhasev was so concerned about keeping and ninety percent share in here and they did that tried to white ballot other internet shopper companies

Like us on an especially

Netscape and they were so concerned about the city even believe shipping out windows ninety eight in order to hide their internet browser to windows ninety eight

The government's lawyer david lloyd once again i used a video clip of tape from the deposition of bill gates

Well i i guess he did a he we get to see the richest man in the world again today for a few seconds and basically have boys point here was to show that they gave testimony that videotape said he wasn't really paying any attention to what netscape is doing he wasn't worried about it

And this is in direct contradiction all of these internal documents that were going on back and forth in the microsoft office is saying they were very concerned and that they can to grab market share from netscape or else they might lose their that dominance in the operating system area it's also important to point out that when did that even though the gate testimony was seen to be very embarrassing for microsoft early in the trial that that kind of evidence that she's pretty sparingly in east of clothing or arguments

Microsoft was uh generally on the defensive in this trial whether they did today but disappeared chair

To put on a nice clean presentation to avoid any of the tour uh exploding a videotape that they had several times including

The heaviest hit the bill gates where he did not come off very well and they presented a very cogent argument i thought to be judged on the microsoft attorney and jack warden said that we can get past these theatrics

Instead the focus on the fact that microsoft is not a monopoly in their view that the i have a ended many features over the years from word processing to office networking software the web browsing software they've always done for free and there's really nothing suspicious about this and he reminded the judge that there has to be extraordinary evidence

That mica said did something wrong to keep other companies out of the business before the court involves any kind of extraordinary relief to cut change the way microsoft acts

So neither side to any big risks with their closing statements access to the judge noted over the big changes and died

That's important here is that the coverage of the trial has emphasized some of the disasters for microsoft or some other really big gains that this was the entire year's testimony presented in just a few hours time we presented and it shows that the judge still has a very tough decision to make between favoring a giant like microsoft or government involvement in a very volatile industry

Thanks very much larry thank you and p. r.'s larry abramson