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Microsoft Pays $536M to Novell
_mArk writes "This morning Novell announced that it had settled a potential law suit with Microsoft related to its NetWare product line. Microsoft agreed to pay $536 million to Novell, but this is not the end as there is another litigation against them pertaining to WordPerfect."
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I know this means a lot to Novell, but big money moves in this industry (like in so many others) like a river. Microsoft has a viable, long term strategy for survival and success. Novell has a viable, long term strategy for survival -- maybe. Part of the Microsoft strategy is legal payoffs as the cost of doing business. Things change when companies fail to innovate. IBM was too slow to keep up so they went through a bad time. Microsoft innovates not in the realm of technology, but in the realm of selling technology. No one does it better.
Unfortunately, they didn't "lose" anything here. They simply bought their way out of trouble yet again...
That's because you're a dope.
Novell et al are firing the first shots in the patent wars, and are forcing Microsoft into this recent patenting blitz.
Everybody loses in the end. But you're happy because Microsoft has to pay out a little pocket change to a dying company that has turned to IP litigation as it's last chance for revenue.
If SCO sued MSFT instead of IBM they'd be slashdot heroes.
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Novell is "reinventing" themselves as a Linux company.
Specifically, who do you think owns SuSE these days? It's Novell.
IMO - I think Novell has a couple of very nice products that they simply need to redeploy - a lot of the technology behind netware is actually pretty cool, but they allowed themselves to become marginalized (IOW - they sat on the laurels they built for themselves in the late80's and early '90s and it's almost put them out of business).
Once they finish this turn around, I expect them to regain some competitiveness, but getting back into "their" market is going to take some doing.
I'd love to agree... except, with the aquisition of Suse, I think they will quickly become the number 2 commercial linux distro, perhaps even number 1 over redhat.
Why do I say this, novell still has name recognition. Sure, they were destroyed by MS in the server arena, but they never lost face in the eyes of us Net Admins. So, as a administrator, if I had to pick a linux distro for my business I would be all over Novell/Suse.
Just my $0.02
I have fond memories of WP5.1 for DOS but I am so glad that we have moved away from SHIFT+ALT+CTRL F11 for foo. WordPerfect took over from WordStar because of superior interface and design. While many people adore WP I wonder if it is more of a holdover from years gone by rather than actual superiority.
Perhaps it's because once you've learned it, the interface style you're "glad that we have moved away from" is actually superior to most modern interfaces, at least in terms of operator efficiency. It's just the learning curve that's a bitch.
It's just the learning curve that's a bitch.
For regular users of the software the learning curve is worth the time. For those that just want to type a quick document but still want to be able to perform operations on the document want to do so without having to look at cryptic key combinations or find options buried in hidden menus.
Most computer users these days are "casual users" and don't care to learn more than point and click. The "power users" might be offended by the fact that they are being left out but the simple fact of the matter is that the "casual users" are the ones in the majority and the ones that the companies cater to.
Gee, I don't know. Maybe some of the failures of Word Perfect (and every other competitor) had something to do with Microsoft's ability to lock them all out of every large Enterprise by their bundling practices. Innovate? Microsoft? Your kidding, right? Their only innovations have been with slimy business practices. No one can dispute their absolute genious there.
First shots?
You think this war started today? And Novell started it?
Go to the US Patent Office website and do a patent search for "Microsoft" and one for "Novell" (under the field "Assignee Name").
See who has been doing it more, and longer. I'll save you the trouble:
Microsoft: 3,520, since March 21, 1985
Novell: 243, September 24, 1990
Microsoft has Novell beat by an order of magnitude and then some. To give you some perspective, Amazon.com are famous for their patents, and they only have 41.
Microsoft is the poster boy for patenting anything and everything, and trying to use their "licensing" schemes to control and monopolize the market.
Nobody but William Gates is "forcing" Microsoft into this patent war. They are the agressors, not the victims. And they know exactly what they are doing.
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There are still keyboard shortcuts for everything in Word, if you want to go ahead and learn them to improve efficiency.
That's what they teach you in those MS Word courses at the local community college (at least thats what the good ones should teach you).
I don't know them, because I don't use Word but maybe twice a year.
With WP I had to know them, which sucked, until 5.1 came out and you could use a mouse to access pulldown menus.
That is, before WP 5.1 came out, I would actually do school reports and stuff in GEOWrite on my old C64, leaving the PC collecting dust. I'd rather wait for the screen to refresh than spend forever scanning over the template to look for the "italics" hotkey.
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You might be a little young to remember, but Word Perfect has been around for quite a while. MS Word always seemed to be the competitor up until Office 95 and more so after Office 97. WP was quite slick in 5.1/5.2 and prior.
WordPerfect became the market leader, then they got all fat and lazy, providing the opportunity for Microsoft to come along and eat their lunch with just a few new features that the folks at WordPerfect were too lazy to implement.
Actually, what happened is that when Microsoft came out with Windows they refused to give the WordPerfect programmers access to the Windows GUI APIs. This prevented them from making a version of Word Perfect that would run in a window instead of through MS-DOS. Microsoft released their MS-WORD with Windows support and became the market leader because no one wanted to stick with a DOS only aplication. It wasn't until later when MS-WORD was the leader that they finally let the WP Programers have access to the APIs. That is why they have a case against Microsoft.
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WPDOS5.x had a mouse-enabled menu; no need to use the F-keys. The problem was that later builds of WP5.1 shipped with the menu disabled by default, so a lot of people never knew it existed. It was enabled by default in WPDOS6.
;)
I've generally had concurrent versions of of both Word and WP (in both their DOS and Wincarnations), installed side by side. Word is easier for very simple documents, but if you need anything more complex than an office memo, Word rapidly falls behind WP; conversely WP can handle anything up through real typesetting jobs. But WP isn't really designed for novice users. (Which I'd think would make it MORE attractive to a linux-oriented crowd, not less.
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What's more, the 536M is about the size of the EU fine... so it's not really about the cash (what's a billion dollars to them?) it's about not letting *anyone*, any entity or government *anywhere*, tell them what to do.
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Maybe some of the failures of Word Perfect (and every other competitor) had something to do with Microsoft's ability to lock them all out of every large Enterprise by their bundling practices.
That's untrue in this case. MS has never truly "bundled" Offce in the same since it bundles other products. It's always been a very expensive add-on for Windows. My research shows that at no time was Office ever required as a requiste for getting a Windows license.
MS's success at killing Wordperect came from good old competition: MS offering discounts to new users, students, lawyers, creative types, Mac users, and the like. MS aggresively marketing Works and then later Word. MS aggresively discount their product and offering it as an add-on for Windows to business PC OEMs.
Word Perfect died because of a lack of vision, a lack of management, and being passed around to crappy vendor after crappy vendor.
Illegal or not - who cares. The new competition commissioner has a history of being vehemently pro-Microsoft. So getting a payout before she dismisses the case may be a jolly good idea.
In btw, Americans have most likely missed this one around the election, but the "powerless" EU parliament managed to torpedo a well-known mafia puppet (The Lituanian candidate) along with a Catolic Bush clone (Italy). While I am not sure that the replacements are much better, this is still a reason for some selebration.
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Almost half a billion dollars seems like a lot of money, but compare that to the loss of customers: at one time, NetWare *was* 70% of all business networks (not the internet, obviously).
So what is that $536 Million? Something like 20 cents on the dollar?
Not that they could have gotten any more. I'm just saying, it is kind of like discounted severance pay: nice to have, but continued income would be better.
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When you ask Microsoft why they are so riddled with exploits the answer is often because they are so popular that hackers everywhere are trying to take a crack at them. It's a pretty decent defense.
Does the same logic hold true for all their lawsuits? Are they so popular that they are natural targets for lawsuits? Either yes, they are, and all the companies that sue them are on the same ethical level as virus writers, or no, and they really are a company that deserves to be sued over and over again.
Funny thing though: they keep getting sued and losing. That puts all the companies that sue them on the moral high ground. Why aren't they getting all the business instead of the shaft? Here we have Microsoft with a nice long queue of lawsuits always waiting for trial and they will lose many if not most of them. So why do people keep doing business with them? Why are they allowed to do business? I thought governments were supposed to protect people from this sort of thing.
This is why I like Open Source. It's a fully functional socialist movement (because it's opt-in) and it actually has the power to stop such bad behavior. Microsoft as a company has such incredible profit margins I can only compare them to Middle-Eastern oil interests and diamond cartels. Bully for them that they're the only public company in the lot, but the rate at which they get sued casts a pretty dark shadow on that. You can't very well produce hydrocarbon and carbon out of thin air, but you certainly can with software and that's just what F/OSS is doing.
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