14 DAY TRIAL // The US District Court for the District of Columbia judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has declared that for the time being she wants an agreement between the plaintiffs and Microsoft in the case concerning the anti-trust desktop search lawsuit and that she will not address the complaint made by Google on this subject.
"The plaintiffs, as far as I'm concerned, stand in the shoes of the consumer. Google is not a party in this case.", the judge said while attending one of the hearings on the Redmond's Company assent with the settlement.
Those things being said you can easily get the whole picture if you think about Google being the originator of this legal action against Microsoft. As it seems, Google just lost the first round of the battle and, if things go on the same path as they are at the moment I'm writing this article, the Mountain View Company may probably lose the whole war altogether.
Although this round didn't go as well as Google expected, they are still on the battleground and have already responded to the declarations made by Kollar-Kotelly by filling a motion that asks for a deeper look on the whole desktop search problem and the changes that have been made by Microsoft in the mean time.
What will be the outcome of this lawsuit? Most probably Microsoft will have to simplify the way one can change the default search program in Windows Vista and Google will have another chance to get at least a small fraction of the number of people using the Microsoft Desktop Search feature to change sides and switch to the desktop search solution provided by the Mountain View Company.
On the other hand, Microsoft might get lucky this time - although I strongly doubt it - and maybe will get to keep the current setup of the Vista desktop search. This way all the Windows users will use the default desktop search engine imposed by the Redmond Company and Google will have quite a tough time getting into this operating system market area.
The conclusion? There isn't one yet but, if given enough time, this anti-trust case will also be solved one way or another. The solution might be against Microsoft - as we're already used to in so many cases similar with this one - but let me remind you that any defendant gets the benefit of the doubt no matter what the accusation is.
Couldn't it be true that Microsoft innocently made their own desktop search engine the default solution to be used in the Vista OS and decided to make the process of changing it to any other solution provided by any of the other major software companies out there so difficult that users would give up in the first 2 minutes? Actually it's quite hard to believe but for now all we can do is to wait for what the judge has to say and to make suppositions on this situation.