Justice Department lawyers battling Microsoft were crestfallen by a 1998 federal appeals court decision that seemed to most experts an across-the-board victory for the company and a potentially fatal blow to the government's suit.

Microsoft's Motive Questioned The nine states battling Microsoft in court have tried to compare the company's response to competition from RealNetworks to its reaction to Netscape, where its actions were found to have thwarted competition.

And beyond that, Sun Microsystems is battling Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard over control of Sun's Java programming language.

Bad Year for Microsoft Rival Corel, a software company battling Microsoft for a share of the word-processing market, reported its worst annual financial performance since its founding in 1985.

Still, some industry executives who have battled Microsoft for years said they could now envision new designs for software products that might not have been viable in a Microsoft-dominated world.

Fight Over Intellectual Property The software industry has long been a staging ground for disputes over intellectual property, starting with Apple battling Microsoft.

The company has been battling Microsoft for months over Microsoft's implementation of Java, which Sun says was modified in violation of the marketing license.

Now Novell is battling Microsoft on its home turf, the PC operating system.

Analysts said that in the coming months Lotus would battle Microsoft with marketing programs aimed at increasing the company's allocation of vital shelf space at retail outlets.

Mr. Schmidt, 52, had spent much of his career battling Microsoft at Sun Microsystems and Novell, before joining Google in 2001.