It's a pattern that's becoming clearer with each passing day of the Microsoft Corp. antitrust trial. A government witness from the computer industry accuses Microsoft of strongarming the company to drop a product that threatened to compete with the software giant. Then Microsoft's lawyers raise questions about the company's real reasons for pulling back. Wasn't it because the product was simply inferior?

That's the point that Microsoft attorney Steve Holley made during tough cross-examination of Intel Corp. Vice-President Steven D. McGeady. Before facing Holley, McGeady had told the court Microsoft threatened to pull back from supporting new Intel microprocessors unless Intel agreed to drop several Internet software technologies it was developing. Such a lack of support would have been devastating to Intel because its new chips need to work seamlessly with Microsoft's Windows operating system. But Holley said Intel really shelved its plans because the new technologies wouldn't work well with Windows 95.

The software technology at the center of the dispute was called native signal processing, which is designed to make audio and video sent over the Internet run smoothly. Deep tensions developed in Microsoft's relations with Intel during 1995 when Intel was developing NSP. McGeady had testified that Microsoft believed that Intel should not be developing any kind of software.

WRONG WINDOWS. But Holley offered some documentary evidence -- and showed a clip from the deposition of McGeady's boss -- that the lawyer said showed Intel eventually dropped the full release of NSP because it would not work with Windows 95, which was released a few months after NSP was supposed to be on the market. McGeady conceded that Intel had designed NSP to work with a version of Windows already on the market, Windows 3.1, because Intel thought Microsoft would face big delays in releasing Windows 95. He said "in restrospect," targeting Windows 3.1 was a mistake.

Holley showed an excerpt of a videotaped deposition of McGeady's superior, Ronald J. Whittier. During the deposition, Whittier acknowledged that Intel's NSP was aimed at Windows 3.1 and was "coming at a time when the focus was on Windows 95." He said pieces of NSP were eventually rolled into Windows 95. When asked whether Intel went this route because Microsoft was pressuring it, Whittier said it was "a factor" but that Intel thought that it was in the company's "best interest not to compromise Windows 95's progress."

Still, McGeady stuck to his contention that pressure from Microsoft was the main reason -- not just "a factor" -- in Intel's decision to drop most of NSP. "We had some help in determining what was in our best interests," he said. He called Whittier's interpretation "PR spin" -- meaning Intel was reluctant to anger Microsoft. When Holley asked why Intel didn't notify Microsoft early of its NSP plans, McGeady said the company was afraid Microsoft would go to the PC makers and "bad-mouth our product." McGeady said that "fear...was ultimately realized -- the fear that Microsoft would ultimately stomp it out of business." After the court takes Wednesday off in observance of Veterans Day, McGeady will return for further cross-examination on Thursday.

Footnotes: While Microsoft CEO Bill Gates may be a visionary in the software industry, he has some blind spots. In one of the more amusing documents in evidence in the trial, handwritten notes by McGeady of a meeting with Gates in July, 1995, quoted Gates as saying, "This antitrust thing will blow over." That comment was made when Microsoft was negotiating with the Justice Dept.'s Antitrust Div. over a consent decree.

A less ironic -- but definitely damaging -- comment that McGeady noted Gates making was, "We haven't changed our business practices at all." Considering that it was allegedly said while Microsoft was in the heat of talks with Justice over its aggressive business pratices, that comment is likely to be used by Justice if it wins this antitrust case to argue to the judge that any remedy must go beyond a don't-do-that-again fix.

And in the category of shoulda-woulda-coulda, Gates also said at this 1995 meeting that, in McGeady's paraphrasing, Microsoft "may change E-mail retention policies." Guess he never got around to making that change.

By Susan Garland in Washington