MICROSOFT PORTRAYED AS PLAYGROUND BULLY.

Byline: Rob Fixmer The New York Times

It was a case in which 26 witnesses put forth a bewildering number of contradictory viewpoints as fact, in which a videotape sullied the legendary brilliance of the world's wealthiest man, in which thousands of e-mail messages offered in evidence at times made various figures in the case look greedy, ruthless, egomaniacal or just plain dishonest.

All this was handed not to a jury but to a single federal judge whose job it was to determine what was fact and what was not. Friday he made his calls.

The Justice Department and 19 states suing Microsoft Corp. in the landmark antitrust suit produced witnesses that portrayed the software giant as an overreaching monopolist, wielding its market power to thwart competition.

Microsoft, the government said, prodded industry partners and rivals to favor its products over competing software and bundled its free Internet browser into its industry-dominating Windows operating system in a predatory scheme that threatened the long-term welfare of consumers.

Microsoft produced witnesses who portrayed the company as a tough but legal competitor whose innovations had fueled the nation's technology boom, to the benefit of the economy and consumers. Where the government alleged illegal arm-twisting, Microsoft saw hard bargaining and commonplace business deals.

It was a courtroom duel that Justice Department lawyers dominated from the opening day of testimony, on Oct. 19, 1998, when they showed the first of several installments of a taped deposition of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates that was taken the previous summer. The video, projected bigger than life on courtroom monitors, was a disaster for the defense, depicting one of the world's most respected businessmen as a surly, combative, uncooperative witness who often said he had forgotten writing the memos, e-mail and directives being shown to him.

Nor did things improve much for Microsoft as the trial went forth. The government presented as witnesses top executives of the nation's most successful computer companies, each of whom in turn told a different tale of the playground bully.

James L. Barksdale, president of Netscape Communications Corp., testified that Microsoft had offered to divide the browser market and that when Netscape refused, Microsoft withheld technology and muscled PC makers and Internet service providers into deals that hobbled Netscape.

David M. Colburn, senior vice president of America Online, told the judge that Microsoft had made his company an offer it could not refuse: a featured place on the Windows desktop - the most valuable real estate in cyberspace - in return for making Microsoft's browser the default choice for its millions of subscribers.

Avadis Tevanian, senior vice president of Apple Computer, testified that Microsoft had threatened to stop developing productivity software for the Macintosh unless Apple favored Microsoft's browser.

Steven McGeady, vice president of Intel, Microsoft's longtime partner in the so-called Wintel duopoly that dominates the personal computer market, said Microsoft threatened to strongly support rival chipmakers if Intel developed multimedia and Internet software.

When Microsoft's turn came in December, it produced witnesses - most of them its own executives - to counter those claims with more positive portrayals of the events in question.

Daniel Rosen, the company's general manager, called Netscape's assertion that Microsoft had tried to divide the browser market ``either fabrications or the products of a fundamental misunderstanding.''

Brad Chase, a Microsoft vice president, said his company's deal with America Online did not require its subscribers to choose Microsoft's browser. He also testified that America Online's recent purchase of Netscape created a new and potent competitor to Microsoft.

Eric Engstrom, Microsoft's general manager, said the company had tried to persuade Apple to use Microsoft's technology. But he said this had been an effort at technological cooperation and not an attempt to hinder competition or divide markets.

Paul Maritz, a group vice president, said Intel had pulled back from its multimedia software efforts because the software was designed for a previous version of Windows.

But the most memorable thing about the testimony of Microsoft's witnesses was not what they said to counter the government's witnesses as much as how they often withered under cross-examination by the government's lead trail lawyer, David Boies.

``We have 12 very powerful witnesses to tell our side of the story,'' William H. Neukom, Microsoft's senior vice president for law and corporate affairs, had declared on the courthouse steps as the defense opened its case.

A silver-haired, patrician lawyer, he stood ramrod straight in front of the courthouse, an air of absolute certainty in his voice. And, like every member of the Microsoft team, Neukom portrayed unwavering confidence throughout the trial.

``On the merits of the case, it's going very well,'' he insisted immediately after several of Microsoft's darkest moments in court.

The most notorious example was an attempt to counter government testimony from Edward W. Felten, a Princeton University computer scientist, who had demonstrated a program that he said stripped the Internet Explorer browser from Windows. This suggested that Windows and the browser were separate programs and not one, as Microsoft insisted.

James Allchin, a senior vice president, came to the stand armed with a videotape that was supposed to prove that the browser had been so tightly integrated into the Windows 98 operating system that it was impossible to remove.

But under questioning by Boies, Allchin was forced to concede that, unknown to him, the video had been pieced together from shots of programs running on several different computers and thus did not really show the impact of deleting the browser.

Allchin returned to court several days later with a new tape, but by then his credibility had been seriously damaged.