During the cross-examination of Compaq executive John Rose, the government's lead attorney, David Boies, accused Rose's employer of leaking confidential information from Be Inc. to Microsoft Corporation. Rose, who said he was unfamiliar with the agreement, earlier came under fire for an email revealing his willingness to defend Microsoft at the trial. Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson interrupted the questioning to ensure that Boies had a strong basis for the allegations, and took a recess so he could find out about the evidence.
When the recess ended, Jackson declared that no more questions about the Be documents could be asked, since Rose had already said he knew nothing about them. Compaq attorneys were enraged by the incident, however, and called the questioning "a cheap trial stunt" by Boies. What the documents are we may never know, but Be is a pretty small company for Microsoft to worry about. Be makes the BeOS, a multimedia operating system that the company says work with, rather than competes with, Windows
