And on today's episode of "Redmond Justice," guest star Avie Tevanian finally gets some actual airtime. Avie took the stand for cross-examination to defend the points made in his scathing, infuriating, and highly entertaining written testimony, submitted last week. That document, you may recall, accused Microsoft in no uncertain terms of threatening to cancel Office for the Mac unless Apple made Internet Explorer the default browser in the Mac OS. It went on to state that following Apple's refusal to stop developing QuickTime for Windows, Microsoft threatened to drive Apple out of the multimedia playback market entirely. For everyone who thought the whole "Age of Apple-Microsoft Harmony" announced in August of last year was nothing but smoke and mirrors, the Avie testimony pretty much backs up your claim.

So today, Avie-- live and in person-- took the stand as Microsoft attorney Theodore Edelman tried to break down his credibility. ("Who's this Edelman guy?" you ask. Well, Microsoft lead litigator John Warden is apparently taking a much-needed break after his marathon bout with Jim Barksdale. So for now, Ted is "the man.") Our impression from the MacWEEK coverage of the trial is that Ted didn't do a very compelling job of casting doubt on Avie's credibility. For instance, to counter Avie's claim that QuickTime was deliberately made incompatible with Internet Explorer for Windows, Ted brought up the fact that Apple routinely refused to sign Microsoft's non-disclosure agreements and therefore weren't allowed access to all beta versions of Microsoft's software. Avie's response, according to a ZDNet article, was the obvious: since the problem was in Windows and not in QuickTime, if they had all the beta versions, "all it would have told [them] was it was broken." Overall, we get the sense that Ted's first appearance on the show was lackluster and needed more spark.

When all's said and done, Ted's argument was essentially not that all those sudden and mysterious incompatibilities in Windows and IE didn't exist, but that Avie couldn't prove that Microsoft put them there on purpose. Of course we're a biased party, but the motive for the "error message" that Windows originally produced when QuickTime was installed (which prompts users to revert to ActiveMovie even though there's no technical error) seems pretty transparent to us. But then again, we aren't the judge in this case. We won't know whether the judge believes Avie or Ted until the decision is finally handed down.