THIS ANTITRUST THING,'' Microsoft chairman Bill Gates allegedly told executives from Intel at a meeting in 1995, ""will blow over.'' Microsoft wasn't changing its business practices at all as a result of the government investigation, Gates continued, according to handwritten notes by an Intel executive--except that it might revise its policy on keeping records of corporate e-mail. That may have been meant as a joke. As of last week the company has never had an e-mail policy, according to a Microsoft spokesman. Thus in its protracted investigation the government was able to get its hands on an estimated 3.3 million Microsoft documents, including mega-bytes of e-mail messages dating from the early 1990s--and is now using them to contradict Gates's own videotaped testimony in the most significant antitrust case of the decade.
From the glass towers of midtown Manhattan to the glass shoe boxes of Silicon Valley rose a muffled murmur of clicks last week, the sound of cubicle dwellers hitting DELETE as they scrolled through years of accumulated electronic correspondence, in search of business plans that smacked of brilliance, as well as illegality; projections of how much the company could save by laying off everyone over 55; dirty jokes; mash notes, and comments about the CEO's bald spot. Those who didn't think of this on their own were encouraged to do so by cybersavvy employers, like Amazon.com, the online book merchant, which this fall instructed workers that all nonessential documents ""should be destroyed when they are no longer current or useful,'' according to a company spokesman. Until now, says Los Angeles attorney Michael Overly, an expert on electronic communications, only around a third of all businesses have had formal policies on the content, handling and archiving of e-mail, and only about a third of those have been actively enforced. But he predicts these numbers will climb sharply, propelled not just by the Microsoft trial but also by Chevron's $2.2 million settlement in 1995 with a group of female employees who took offense at e-mail postings such as the one headed ""25 reasons why beer is better than women.'' For many companies, he says, ""the honeymoon with e-mail is coming to an end.''
Surprisingly, indiscreet e-mail can be even more dangerous than written records and memos. An unfiled note gets deleted in the next day's trash, but in a typical office network almost all e-mail is recorded on the system server (graphic). Messages sent years ago may live on in taped storage, far beyond the reach of a delete key, although not of a subpoena. Lack of space is rarely a problem; Randy Kolb, information services director for the city of Eugene, Ore., estimates that one employee has 180 megabytes of e-mail stored up, equivalent to roughly 180,000 typed sheets of paper. But it would be the work of minutes for a computer to sort it all for lawyers in search of a single incriminating phrase.
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