Gates in the Dock

You couldn't blame Microsoft's legal team for feeling a little cranky last week. Just as the lawyers prepped for opening arguments in their historic antitrust suit, word came through that their bid to force a pair of Harvard and M.I.T. professors to hand over taped, off-the-record interviews had been tossed out of a Boston court. What these tapes were said to contain had the software giant's people salivating: top executives at Netscape, their chief rival in the browser wars, were caught candidly admitting to strategic--perhaps fatal--business blunders. It would have been "the best evidence," laments Charles ("Rick") Rule, Microsoft legal consultant...