That cracking sound you hear is Microsoft's key defense suffering another hammer blow from the Justice Dept. On Monday, Feb. 1, the government struck again at Microsoft's key defense, this time with James Allchin, a senior vice-president at the software company, on the hot seat. Allchin admitted that consumers could achieve many of the same benefits of Windows 98 with its integrated Internet Explorer browser by buying an earlier version of Windows and combining it themselves with a retail version of IE.

Microsoft has long been expected to prove that integrating its Internet Explorer browser into Win 98 was not an illegal tie under antitrust laws. After all, the Justice Dept., which argues that Microsoft integrated in order to extend its Windows dominance into the browser market, seemed to face an impossibly high hurdle in overcoming a June, 1998, appeals court ruling. The court ruled then that integration would be fine as long as Microsoft could show that there was "some plausible benefit" that could not be achieved by end users by combining two separate products themselves.

But Allchin conceded within minutes of taking the witness stand in the afternoon session that consumers could achieve much of that benefit themselves. During the morning session, the company played several videotaped demonstrations of Win 98 that showed how users can employ Internet technologies to "achieve seamless access" to files stored on the Internet, the hard disk, floppy disks, and other locations. This enabled users to go back and forth between local files and the Web with one click.

REPLAY REVIEW. During cross-examination, David Boies, Justice's lead litigator, used those demonstrations against Allchin. Replaying Microsoft's demonstration and then stopping it every time the narrator explained a benefit to the user, Boies asked Allchin whether a user could achieve the same benefit by buying Windows 95 at the store and combining it with the retail version of Internet Explorer 4.0. Boies stopped the tape close to 20 times, and each time Allchin conceded that the benefits were close to the same.

But Allchin also said Internet Explorer was replacing "core operating systems files," while the browser offered by Netscape Communications Corp., which didn't include these files, would be unable to offer the same improvements as Explorer combined with Windows.

Boies brushed aside this argument. He said the point is consumer choice. A user of Win 95, Boies said, could decide whether to add Explorer or Netscape's browser, or go without a browser. "If you got it one way, there's a competitive choice," he said. "If they got it another way, there was no choice."

Cross-examination of Allchin will resume Feb. 2.

By Susan Garland in Washington