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On 7 June 2000, US Federal District Judge Penfield Jackson ordered that Microsoft be broken up into two separate companies after the most important anti-monopoly trial in American corporate history.

The ruling followed Jackson's finding on 3 April 2000 that Microsoft was guilty of a litany of abuses of its monopoly power which had robbed consumers of choice, unfairly damaged competing IT companies and smothered innovation. The financial markets responded by wiping $80 billion off Microsoft's capitalisation in one day, as the world's most profitable company's share price plunged by nearly 15%.

The NASDAQ, the US stock market which concentrates on technology companies, suffered its fifth worst day ever. The continuing subsequent decline of both Microsoft's stock price and the NASDAQ helped trigger the meltdown in dot.com stocks, which in turn is leading to the US-led slowdown in the global economy. Clearly this is world-changing stuff.

Hard of hearings

It's pretty amazing to think that the whole mad charade was triggered by concerns over the future of a Web browser, Netscape's Navigator. In World War 3.0: Microsoft and its Enemies, US journalist and author Ken Auletta recounts the extraordinary events that led an instinctively pro-business, Reagan-appointed US judge to impose such a draconian ruling on the most powerful IT company in the world.

Auletta uses the long 20-month anti-trust trial, in which Microsoft was accused by the US Department of Jusice of unlawful use of the Windows monopoly to crush competition, as the core narrative for his 430-page book.

Somehow maintaining a coherent narrative thread through the complex, relentlessly repetitive and sometimes dull hearings - the book mentions five occasions in which Judge Jackson appears to nod off in court. Auletta also focuses on the key players in the story. We learn about the Department of Justice employees and their growing anger with the arrogant refusal by Microsoft to reach any kind of compromise or, in their view, abide by the spirit of past settlements.

Auletta does his best to get to the bottom of the brilliant, relentlessly aggressive and emotionally incomplete Bill Gates, but he still remains an enigma. Auletta is

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more successful in illustrating just how uncannily the corporate culture of the giant corporation Microsoft is a cartoon-esque extension of Gates' 'hardcore' persona.

This 'sophomoric' culture of cut-throat competitiveness and disregard for social and ethical responsibility drove Microsoft's extraordinary success, but, contends Auletta, it may also contain the seeds of the company's downfall. Auletta makes it very clear that Gates' own intransigence sabotaged early attempts by both the US government and Judge Jackson to reach a compromise settlement, and ultimately led Microsoft to a far worse place.

Even now, as the company seems to be enjoying some success in the US Appeals Court, Microsoft has suffered from the sapping effects of a harrowing, two-year legal battle, which entailed the collection of more than three million documents. Worse still, it was the evasive and dissembling nature of Gates' own video-taped testimony which set the whole tone of the trial and convinced Judge Jackson that Microsoft lacked credibility.

So it's not just Apple which is an embodiment of its founder, and sometimes for the worse. Apple's role in this book is surprisingly large, and the book turns up testimony relating to its battles with Microsoft, including the unsuccessful 'look and feel' suit, and Microsoft's bullying of Apple by threatening to cancel Office for the Mac. Auletta leaves no doubt that Microsoft tried to hinder Apple's development of QuickTime for Windows, and that Apple's switch from Netscape Navigator to Internet Explorer in 1997 was not because Microsoft had a superior browser.

Trials and tribulations

Auletta's long book is testament to the author's extensive research, dutiful attendance of every court session and his access to all the key players: indeed Microsoft has used disparaging quotes by Judge Jackson to Auletta during its Appeal Court hearing this year to try to establish that he was biased against it.

Auletta clearly loves lawyers, too. While the book provides an often disturbing revelation into the arbitrariness and costliness of US justice, another theme is how the agonisingly slow process of complex anti-trust law means that whatever conclusions it reaches are out of date when applied to the rapidly changing technology market.

But, unless you're a budding law student, the book sometimes loses a little focus: do we really care that the wife of John Warden, one of the Microsoft legal team, 'is famous in Bedford, New York, for the quality of the English flower, vegetable, water and rock gardens she tends, each set off by formal squares and paths'?

And with Microsoft looking ever more likely to win its appeal against Judge Jackson, one begins to pity Auletta for possibly wasting two years of his life on what might be an ultimately futile process.