Whoops! Months and months of testimony, scores of witnesses, millions of words of testimony - and the whole case against Microsoft, the monopolist which needed to be broken up, fell apart yesterday because of a few ill-timed words from the trial judge, Thomas Penfield Jackson, to the media.
Ken Auletta, the New Yorker columnist whose book on the trial, World War 3.0, was serialised in these pages, has a lot to answer for. He enjoyed 10 private hours with Judge Jackson - 10 hours which seem to have destroyed the judge's career. Still, at least Auletta will have a sequel: How I saved, rather than slayed, the beast of Redmond.
The trial judge's comments, uttered under embargo to be published after the judgment, always seemed intemperate. But then also there was always the expectation that once the Bush administration entered office, Microsoft would be off the hook. Jackson and Auletta simply gave the software group's attorneys room to wriggle.
The US appeals court has upheld the claim that Microsoft is a monopoly but, crucially, it has rejected the claim that the company acted unfairly in the browser wars, blowing away its great rival, Netscape. And the remedy of splitting Microsoft in two is history.
This is a huge blow to the world's software industry, which has to live with the fact that the development of any new piece of innovative software risks Microsoft producing its own version, which is then bolted on to the Windows operating system - putting the original developer out of business.
Clunky old Windows will remain on 90% of the world's desktops and Microsoft will impose itself further on all our cyber-lives. Yesterday, the company said it would be delaying the introduction of "smart tags" on Internet Explorer - links which threaten to pop up on screen guiding surfers to relevant Microsoft sites when looking at something else. But they will arrive, allowing someone reading this text on Guardian Unlimited to get a clean version of the news from the company direct.
While we are all waiting, here's the dumb tag:microsoft.com/presspass/ .
Buy Vodafone
A casual reading of the City's current re search output gives the impression that Vodafone, the world's largest mobile phone company and at one time Europe's biggest company by market capitalisation, is fast disappearing down a virtual vortex.
Every possible stick has been used to beat the share price lower: delays to third generation technology, huge stock overhangs, a colossal goodwill bill stemming from the past two years' acquisition spree, to mention just three common gripes.
Each represents an important reason to be cautious of a company whose value has fallen from £223bn to less than £100bn in the space of 15 months. But when every investment bank is singing from the same "sell" note, it is worth questioning why all the analysts have reached such a view simultaneously, and whether they are actually correct.
Sure, 3G technology is going to be ridiculously late, and take-up among consumers is bound to be substantially slower than the wired tomorrow which was painted last year. But it will appear and it will eventually change the way we do simple things, like buying train tickets.
Yesterday, the Mobey Forum, a broad group of phone companies and banks set up last year, said it had agreed a recommended standard architecture for the development of mobile commerce - basically an extra chip that will sit alongside existing phone sim cards, allowing the user to put a payment on any preferred credit or debit account. Development for the mass market is presumably years away, but it will arrive.
As for stock overhangs, these are a real problem for Vodafone, which has been printing share certificates with a speed and efficiency never seen before. Yet the issue is short-term and, in any case, this company's great salvation lies in the fact that it financed its expansion with eq uity rather than debt. On the allegation that Vodafone massively overpaid in snapping up market share around the world, the company stands guilty as charged. But this fact is already priced into Vodafone's share price, which has fallen from 385p to a low of 146p, before yesterday's bounce to 157.5p.
As for the timing of bearish analyst reports, it is worth noting that there is nothing remotely new in any of the above gripes. Every bank on Wall Street and in the City has a large, highly paid telecoms team, which no longer has the mergers and acquisitions work for which it was originally hired.
It is a fact of modern financial life that aggressive trading advice is much more likely to be driven by a desire to generate commissions than circulate honest new ideas.
Vodafone is a world beater in a fast-growing sector, promising fat margins. Buck the market, buy the shares.
