26 Facts About Steven McGeady

Steven McGeady is a former Intel executive best known as a witness in the Microsoft antitrust trial.

Steven McGeady left Intel in 2000, but later again gained notoriety for defending his former employee Mike Hawash after his arrest on federal terrorism charges.

Steven McGeady is a member of the Reed College Board of Trustees, the Portland Art Museum Board of Trustees, and the PNCA Board of Governors, and lives in Portland, Oregon.

Reed's computer was the first in the Northwest to run the Unix operating system, allowing Steven McGeady to become an early developer in that environment.

At the time of his departure in June 2000, Steven McGeady was Vice President of Intel's New Business Group.

Steven McGeady was a co-founder of the Intel Architecture Labs, a research and development group focused on advancing the personal-computer platform.

Steven McGeady ran the software, multimedia, data security, and Internet programs within this group for most of the 1990s.

Steven McGeady's group developed Intel's ProShare video-conferencing technology, the Indeo video compression technology, and Intel's Display Control Interface and VxD graphics software, later licensed to Microsoft to form the core of DirectX.

Steven McGeady hired Cygnus Support to integrate those changes into the mainline GNU tools and to improve the tools' ability to deal with many object file formats.

Steven McGeady was Vice-President of Intel's Multimedia, Communications, and Internet activities from 1990 through 1996, where he led the development of the first desktop video-compression software for the PC, Intel's early implementations of multimedia network broadcast protocols, the first products to combine television and web pages, online virtual communities, the Java language, and data security infrastructure.

Grove later said that he and Intel would have grasped the importance of the Internet to the company more quickly had Steven McGeady taken the job.

Steven McGeady had a less positive relationship with succeeding CEO Craig Barrett, reportedly telling Barrett to "pound sand" when Barrett instructed him not to testify in the Microsoft case.

In 1998, Steven McGeady was a witness for the US Department of Justice in the US vs Microsoft antitrust case, where he testified about Microsoft's attempts to control Intel's software efforts as well as their behavior toward Netscape and Sun's Javasoft.

Steven McGeady was the only executive from the PC industry to testify for the government.

Steven McGeady testified that Microsoft opposed Intel's 1995 work on a new technology called Native Signal Processing, which would have used instructions from Intel's chips, rather than software code from Microsoft, to run multimedia and communications programs more quickly.

Steven McGeady testified for the government and against Microsoft despite pressure from inside Intel.

Steven McGeady claimed in his testimony that Microsoft Vice-President Paul Maritz had described, in a meeting at Intel, Microsoft's plan to "embrace, extend, [and] extinguish" the HTML standard until it would be incompatible with the Netscape browser.

In November 1998, Steven McGeady testified that Microsoft leveraged its monopoly power in Windows to impede Intel's ability to compete with Microsoft in areas involving system software and influence of OEMs:.

Microsoft, in their response to Steven McGeady's testimony, made the point that his testimony contained several pro-Microsoft threads and that Intel practiced similar cross-product subsidization, distributing free Intel Architecture Labs software funded by microprocessor revenues.

Steven McGeady's notes suggested that portions of his testimony could be considered embellishments or stories heard in other contexts, and he was frequently forced to suggest that he had a recollection of meetings and conversations superior to that of other Intel officials, as well as Netscape officers.

Microsoft claimed that Steven McGeady's actions suggested that he considered himself above Intel policy and an extra-corporate defender of truth and justice in the Internet world, and Steven McGeady openly suggested that Intel's interference with Microsoft would aid the industry.

Steven McGeady admitted leaking confidential information to The New York Times journalist John Markoff and met with Netscape's Jim Clark to keep Netscape from being complacent about the threat from Microsoft.

Documents show Steven McGeady envisioning entrapping Microsoft in an antitrust suit, and later he indirectly volunteered to testify against Microsoft.

Steven McGeady was called again to testify in the 2001 remedy phase of the Microsoft trial.

Steven McGeady entered the news again in 2003 because of his defense of his former Intel employee Mike Hawash who was arrested at Intel in early 2003.

Steven McGeady organized a defense fund and protested Hawash's 6-week incommunicado detention without charge.