Final Microsoft oversight committee member named

The third and final person to serve on a technical committee that will enforce Microsoft’s compliance with the antitrust settlement approved last year has been selected.

The two members proposed in November last year by Microsoft and the U.S. Department of Justice, although not yet appointed by the court, have selected Edward Stritter to complete the three-person committee, according to a filing by the Justice Department with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday.

Microsoft, the Justice Department, and the nine U.S. states that were part of the settlement interviewed Stritter and approve his selection, according to the filing.

Stritter joins Harry Saal, selected by the Justice Department and the settling states, and Franklin Fite, selected by Microsoft, on the committee.

Each member of the three-person oversight committee is appointed for 30 months. The committee is to work from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and has broad powers, including the right to interview any Microsoft personnel and access to Microsoft’s source code, according to the final judgment approving the settlement.

Stritter started his career in technology in 1968 as a programmer for Bell Laboratories. He then worked as chief architect for the 68000 processor at Motorola and later founded MIPS Computer, where the first commercial RISC (reduced instruction set computer) microprocessor was developed. MIPS was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1992.

Since 2000, Stritter has been working as an angel investor in startups in the wireless Internet field, after leaving a job as director of business development for Cisco’s wireless access business. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, and a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford University in California.