Today, everyone at the Court of First Instance noticed something that I think is a really huge difference between this Microsoft hearing and the original trial that occurred in the US. That is, the judges today are VERY familiar with the technology involved in the dispute. Use of the Internet has grown significantly since the late 90s, making it difficult for either side to fool the judges. For instance, the lead attorney for the EC kept insisting that downloading is not cheap or easy and that it “is not a viable alternative to pre-installation.†The judges clearly didn’t buy this argument with one of them (President Bo Vesterdorf) outright saying “I manage from time to time to do it.†And of course, if one goes to downloads.com one will see that there’s a lot of demand for downloads and RealPlayer is the 4th most popular audio and video download with 183,598 downloaded in just the last week.
Judge John D. Cooke was probably the most critical in his questioning, noting that it is very difficult to predict what will happen in the marketplace. For instance, he noted that while everyone had thought that Internet Explorer had won the browser wars, now many people are using the increasingly popular Mozilla.