Surely, Steven McGeady has had better days. The soft-spoken Intel executive, who is the Justice Dept.'s fourth witness in its landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft, was dragged through the mud on Nov. 12 by defense attorneys in a sometimes brutal cross-examination.

In a day-long pummeling, Microsoft attorneys derided McGeady as incompetent, a liar, a "prima donna," and "a lone wolf" who couldn't get along with other employees. To top it off, Microsoft defense counsel Steven Holley also released embarrassing internal documents in which McGeady likened Microsoft to the devil and referred to his own boss, Intel CEO Andy Grove, as a "mad dog."

The attack may have tarnished McGeady's credibility. But he never lost his cool, and nothing Microsoft threw at him disproved his most important contention: that Microsoft had pressured Intel into dropping a key project that infringed on the software giant's long-term product development plans.

SOMETHING PERSONAL? Microsoft's central thesis was that McGeady had a personal grudge against the company. Specifically, Microsoft attorneys said McGeady blamed the colossus of Redmond when a project he had been working on, involving an Intel software initiative called native signal processing, was dropped in August, 1995. "You blame Microsoft for what happened to you in August, 1995," Holley asserted to the witness. McGeady denied the charge.

In one of the day's more entertaining moments, Holley entered into evidence a memorandum McGeady wrote that same month, entitled "Sympathy for the Devil." Noting that Microsoft was using the Rolling Stones' hit Start Me Up as a theme song in its Windows 95 commercials and promotions, McGeady suggested that a more appropriate choice "from the same source" would be Sympathy for the Devil.

Then Microsoft released a September, 1995, McGeady memorandum in which he referred to Grove as a mad dog. This prompted U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who has lashed out at Microsoft attorneys several times during the trial to ask, "Are you just trying to embarrass him?" Nonetheless, after Holley denied that this was his motivation, Jackson ordered the memorandum to be entered into evidence -- over government objections.

TRADING LICKS. Microsoft's angle of attack throughout the trial been to show that McGeady and other government witnesses lacked firsthand knowledge of many of the events in their testimony. For example, Holley noted that McGeady never attended a meeting in which he claimed that Microsoft CEO Bill Gates had yelled at Intel's Grove. Holley then displayed an E-mail from Grove to Gates written the next day in which he said he was "very happy to have had the chance of a relaxed and in-depth discussion." If Microsoft loses the case, it's expected that the company will object to the Justice Dept.'s use of secondhand evidence, or hearsay, to prove its case.

But though Microsoft tarnished McGeady, it never landed any knockout blows. Even if McGeady had a grudge against the company, that won't necessarily disprove his testimony about the company's pressure tactics. And McGeady landed a few licks himself. At one point, he struck back at Microsoft, declaring that the company had illustrated "a level of predatory competition beyond anything I had ever seen."

His testimony only serves to reinforce the similar stories that have been shared by the government's earlier witnesses. Next week will be the fifth week of the trial, and it will start off with one of the government's key technological witnesses, Glenn Weadock, president of Independent Software.

By Mike France in Washington