Slashdot Mirror
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."
perhaps SCO went after the wrong people ?
Business Voyeur
It was already slow for me, with 0 posts, so here it is:
WALTHAM, Mass. -- Nov. 08, 2004 -- Novell today announced an agreement with Microsoft to settle potential antitrust litigation related to Novell's NetWare operating system in exchange for $536 million in cash. Novell also announced that by the end of this week it will file an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the United States District Court in Utah seeking unspecified damages in connection with alleged harm to Novell's WordPerfect application software business in the mid-1990s.
Under terms of the settlement, in exchange for the cash payment, Novell has agreed to a general release of claims that it has as of the date of the agreement, with certain exclusions that include patent claims and claims associated with Novell's WordPerfect business. The agreement also includes a release by Microsoft of claims that would have been compulsory counterclaims to the NetWare claims asserted by Novell. Finally, Novell has agreed to withdraw its intervention in the European Commission's case with Microsoft.
"We are pleased that we have been able to resolve a portion of our pending legal issues with Microsoft," said Joseph A. LaSala, Jr., Novell's senior vice president and general counsel. "This is a significant settlement, particularly since we were able to achieve our objectives without filing expensive litigation. While we have agreed to withdraw from the EU case, we think our involvement there has been useful, as it has assisted the European proceedings and facilitated a favorable settlement with Microsoft. With the EU case now on appeal, we are comfortable with our decision to withdraw from the proceeding. There is simply not much left for us to do.
"We regret that we cannot make a similar announcement regarding our antitrust claims associated with the WordPerfect business. We have had extensive discussions with Microsoft to resolve our differences, but despite our best efforts, we were unable to agree on acceptable terms. We intend to pursue our claims aggressively toward a goal of recovering fair and considerable value for the harm caused to Novell's business," LaSala said.
The WordPerfect suit that Novell will file seeks unspecified damages arising from Microsoft's efforts to eliminate competition in the office productivity applications market during the time that Novell owned the WordPerfect word-processing application and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet application. The suit is based in part on facts proved by the United States Government in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft. In that suit, Microsoft was found to have unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems by eliminating competition in related markets.
Legal notice regarding forward looking statements
This press release includes statements that are not historical in nature and that may be characterized as "forward-looking statements," including those related to future financial and operating results, benefits and synergies of the company's brands and strategies, future opportunities and the growth of the market for open source solutions. You should be aware that Novell's actual results could differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations of Novell management and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, including, but not limited to, Novell's ability to integrate acquired operations and employees, Novell's success in executing its Linux strategies, Novell's ability to deliver on its one Net vision of the Internet, Novell's ability to take a competitive position in the Linux industry, business conditions and the general economy, market opportunities, potential new business strategies, competitive factors, sales and marketing execution, shifts in technologies or market demand and the other factors described in Novell's Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on July 2, 2004. Novell disclaims any intention or obligation to update any forward-looking statements as a result of developments occurring after the date of this press release.
Robert Bindler
A Computer Science student's views on technology.
"Finally, Novell has agreed to withdraw its intervention in the European Commission's case with Microsoft."
No new boxes of tissue until Tuesday!
Oh, the nasal anguish!
I bet the sysadmin is having a case of the Mondays.
Maybe now they can change the "eval" flag to "fully free"
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
No, wait, I thought we liked Novelle now.
Damn it, did I miss a meeting again?
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
The WordPerfect suit that Novell will file seeks unspecified damages arising from Microsoft's efforts to eliminate competition in the office productivity applications market during the time that Novell owned the WordPerfect word-processing application and the Quattro Pro spreadsheet application. The suit is based in part on facts proved by the United States Government in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft. In that suit, Microsoft was found to have unlawfully maintained a monopoly in the market for personal computer operating systems by eliminating competition in related markets.
Now, I can't stand MSFT's business tactics as much as the next Slashdotter but WordPerfect missed the fucking boat on a lot of shit when it came to the migration from DOS to Windows...
Novell bought out WordPerfect 3/94. They were supporting legacy versions of WordPerfect for DOS and updating several versions for Windows. How they expected to compete against Word was really beyond me. Any software application that basically required a function key explanation chart at the top of every keyboard was doomed when GUI took hold.
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.
Personally, Word is easy to get and use and it happens to be better than what Corel/Novell was offering at the time and that's why it won out. Maybe this lawsuit was better served 10 years ago in 1994 and not now in 2004.
I would like to see Novell overpower Microsoft more often. From the looks of Novell's new linux product lineup, it appears they may be a major competitor against microsoft in the future.
Paying off these lawsuits is just the cost of doing business for MS. But given their perversion of reality, I wouldn't be surprised if I soon see Balmer giving one of his heart attack speeches claiming that they love open source and that by paying these law suits that they are really funding it.
My
WordPerfect... The OTHER Monopoly. Several Law, Insurance, & State departments are still forced to use WordPerfect because they archived in WPDs.
I really don't feel for WordPerfect's side on that suit.
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.
So is *this* the reason that Chris left Novell on Friday?
http://www.theboyz.biz/Your source for hardware, software, video games, small appliances, electronics and more!
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
I am so glad that we have moved away from SHIFT+ALT+CTRL F11 for foo.
:-)
I take it you're not an Emacs user...
It is one of those things that are supposed to help you read by preparing the reader for what they are reading.
It is similar to having the upside-down question marks and such in spanish... it is so the reader knows up front that they are reading a question.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Someone make a nice chart with who paid who what...
I have a snakeing suspiscion that the IT world, for all thier intelligence and success, are being played by sleeping agents of lawyers who deliberately steer companies to collide, and the resultant lawsuites just move money around, while the lawyers skim the cheddar off the top...
So, to draw sides:
Novell, Sun, IBM, AMD
versus
Microsoft, SCO, Intel and... erm...
Man this hurts my head, who to trust...
I noticed Novell came from nowhere (IMHO) recently exposurewise, they really built themselves up as a player (IMHO) and this linux offering is becoming the dotCom tradition now, make a any company, and you have to have your own distro! (Yeah yeah I know about novell and unix)
Maybe one day Microsoft will have thier own linux distro...
Oh, I forgot, they are buying licenses off SCO, and rewriting gnu code into longhorn (true!)
Well done those guys.
Now who hates kodak?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
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
hey if whining gets me a cool half a bill sign me up!!!! anywho i have some small stock in novell so news like this is good news to me....
What would you say, "536 dollar million"?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being shitty at the time.
Not up on your computer history, are you? You *must* have meant to say:
"NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being NON EXISTANT at the time."
Novell Netware predates ANY Microsoft networking. For most of the late 80's/early 90's until Windows for Workgroups came out, Netware and Banyan Vines were the only way to get a bunch of PCs to form a network. I am presuming you didn't actually work with computers and networks during this time frame, because if you did, there's no way you could have made such an erroneous statement.
And Novell has innovated quite a bit. Or were you just being ironic? Where do you think Microsoft got the "inspiration" for Active Directory, among other things?
I can't speak for the US, but New Zealand certainly puts the $ up-front. We'd say "536 million dollars", though.
Ditto for the UK and most of the rest (all?) of the EU: the Pound (Sterling) or Euro symbol would go up-front, but they'd say it with the currency last.
Just out of curiousity, which currencies don't follow this system?
This is where the serious fun begins.
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.
Microsoft did NOT lose this lawsuit. They simply paid off one of the the victims of their crime.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
...Word is based on Wordperfect so even if OO.o Writer is copying Word it'll be free and clear unless Novell decides to sue which is unlikely I'd guess.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
"We are pleased that we have been able to resolve a portion of our pending legal issues with Microsoft"
Well, duh! You're going to get a check for over half a billion dollars. I'd be more than "pleased."
Developers: We can use your help.
I was loading up on NOVL stock friday on that selloff over Chris Stone leaving.
With news of this big settlement comes the question: Why did Chris Stone leave?
Was it because of the terms of this settlement? What concessions did Microsoft get from Novell to make the settlement work for them? Will this now affect Novell's Linux strategy?
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
MS hasn't lost anything yet and is not likely to lose. Buy paying $500M now they get Novell off their backs for the international case and will probably avoid a much bigger fine down the road. It's a cost of doing business. If they didn't want to pay Novell the $500M they could have tied them up in court until Novell was a penny stock with two employees left. If MS paid out, it's because they have a strategy that makes it worthwhile in the long run.
http://www.busyweather.com/
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.
No. But the sign still goes in front.
Or did he quit in protest? From last weeks story: Open Source Advocate VP Chris Stone Leaves Novell
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Microsoft had LAN Manager, which was direct, if crappy, competition to Netware and Banyan, before they incorporated into WfW as peer-to-peer filesharing. Indeed, if you peek at even the NT networking layer dlls, I believe you will still see ID strings titled "LANMAN" -- showing that there still either exists some LAN Manager code in Windows, or at least that the NetBEUI layer is still codenamed after what it originated from.
Is it a strategy on Microsofts part to legitimize software related lawsuits?
They have really deep pockets. They can afford to pay. When the pay they achieve two things:
1) They can stop worrying about the lawsuit and continue with their business.
2) They also legitimize the claim of the other company, in this case Novell, thereby setting a precedent.
When Microsoft sets a precedent it means that the next company that Sun or Novell or SCO sues will almost certainly have to pay. There is a precedent after all. But that company might not be able to pay. And then Microsoft has one competitor less.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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.
Lose Weight and Feel Great with Isagenix
Looking at Novell's product line, they seem to be a dead company... or a totally restructured one from the past...
Better check and be sure first:
www.netcraft.com
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
That's the executive pay more than taken care of, now they can get nice fat "performance"-related bonuses too!
Ah, just kidding, they're doing good stuff.
Don't you mean partnered with the wrong people?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Which browser/file manager/whatever can browse a windows share the same way explorer does?
That is, I can type \\servername\share\folder into the "address bar", or equivelant, and be able to browse it? Or browse the entire network to discover shares with a "network neighbourhood" type of equivelant?
I can't get LISA to work properly, and don't particularly care for KDE. LISA all works around pinging hosts, and as a rule my boxes all ignore ICMP. No reason to ping stuff on my lan at home.
Is there such support actually built into any file manager, that doesnt require some wonky daemon in the background? Mounting the share to access it is awkward, and you have to know the fully qualified path to the share (no browsing or discovery).
Printers too. I want to browse the network, find a printer, and click on it to install it, just like in windows. Can such things be done yet?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Well, let's be fair though -- the only computer that is truly secure is unplugged, locked-up in a warehouse, and guarded by very hungry dogs. Since the bewilderingly large majority of people use Windows, it makes sense to target Windows for things like spyware, viruses, etc. If the Macintosh had more than 2% of the market, those spyware/virus makers would spend more time on the Macintosh. I'm old enough to remember the days when Macintoshes had /more/ viruses than Windows did for this reason -- Mac used to be on top.
In french the symbol is written after the digits. i.e:
English: $25
French: 25$
I'm really indiferent to it in most cases. I suppose it is easier to understand when reading the french way. I say that because the symbols apppear in the order you'd say them aloud.
"Twenty-five dollars" = 25$.
They did, and they were.
Well there were heroes many protoslashdotters. However, there was no slashdot during that lawsuit.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
While the international Japanese symbol for yen comes before the numerical value, I believe the Kanji comes after the number when money is expressed in Japanese, matching up with the way dates and times are expressed.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
This brings up a question I have had - how come I can open up Word documents in OpenOffice, but not WordPerfect documents? OpenOffice has conversion tools built-in for many formats, but not WP.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
This cost Microsoft about 3 cents in earnings this quarter, taking their earnings from 23 cents to 20 cents. So it might depress earnings by 4 percent for one year. Not a bad price to pay for blowing away yet another competitor.
I think it's fair to say Novell's software was better than Microsoft's, not that Microsoft didn't have any. Microsoft's was crude, but it most certainly did exist.
Windows for Workgroups was rather more powerful than what had been before, in part because it supported more standardized protocols such as TCP/IP together with dial up systems.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
1. Develop word processing software
2. Attempt to compete with Microsoft
3. Watch the share prices take a dive
4. Fire sell software to Corel for $186 Million
5. Watch Corel's share price take a dive
6. Sue Microsoft
7. Settle with Microsoft for $536 Million
8 Profit!
Do not look into the laser with remaining eye.
I vaguely remember that Thai Baht generally has the symbol at the end. And of course, pretty much all currencies put their fractional sign (usually hundreths, such as (p)ence, (c)ent, etc) at the end...
It's too late for me to die young
So who would you back in a Microsoft vs. SCO case?
:-)
Maybe the only case where I don't mind the Lawers
being the only ones to win
return 0; }
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
WordPerfect 5.1 had pulldown menus and 6.0 had a toolbar similar to Word's. Corel WordPerfect 6.2 for DOS is still a great word processor even now, imho, and to me no harder to get running with as a n00b than Word.
Moll.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Finally, Novell has agreed to withdraw its intervention in the European Commission's case with Microsoft.
Hrrm... I usually just sign my name.
Not being able to get WordPerfect pre-installed and being forced to take Office or crappy Works pretty much killed WordPerfect. Wordperfect is still a better product than Word ... Quattro and Paradox have been exceeded by their MS counterparts, but WP is still better in my opinion.
Agreed. There were lots of misteps by Novell concerning WP. The first one was buying it. The second was dismantling the WP sales force and trying to sell it through Novell's sales channel. However, you could also argue that Novell got it too late. WP had already screwed up by not moving to Windows quickly enough. Then, when they did, they released a poor product. WP was in big trouble when Novell bought them, already having had massive layoffs. The carnage just continued after the purchase.
Well, when using a symbol, the symbol comes first, for pounds, dollars, yen, won. When using a word (and that includes the kanji 'en'), the word comes last, again for pounds, dollars, yen and won. So I think the rule is pretty near global.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Just out of curiousity, which currencies don't follow this system?
In Switzerland we write 10 Fr. (Franks) or 10 CHF, where CHF is the ISO currency symbol for the Swiss Frank.
Prior to the Euro, many of the European currency 'symbols', which were usually one or more letters, followed the currency amount. I think that Spain even used a ligature of 'Pts' for their Pesetas. It followed the amount.
A simple minded rule would be that real symbols, $, Euro, etc. all precede the currency amount and 'symbols' composed of normal letters follow it. But I believe that the Japanese Yen symbol follows the currency amount.
Ultimately the syntax used for stating a currency and amount is simply a practice, derived from custom and culture, that has evolved over many centuries. Thus, there is no general rule. Attempts have been made to standardize (e.g. ISO currency designators), but universal acceptance, by shopkeepers and the man on the street, has been low.
Internally in banks, in Europe anyways, amounts of money are written as a value followed by an ISO currency symbol. The ISO symbol is used to ensure that no mistake is made, say by assuming that '$' means US dollars (USD) instead of Hong Kong dollars (HKD).
You can read more that you even wanted to know about currencies at the Oanda web site. It in includes a forum where you and ask about currencies and a gallery of scans of various international bank notes.
---- It won't be as bad as you fear or as good as you hope, but it will take twice as long as you plan.
Too close to call for me.
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.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
There are still keyboard shortcuts for everything in Word, if you want to go ahead and learn them to improve efficiency.
Yeah, and I know most of them. I still think WP's interface was more efficient (although I'll admit it's been well over 10 years since I used it last, and I only used it for about 6 months at the time). Even commonly used features that require two keystrokes in Word (e.g. bold & italic) could be done with one in WP, if memory serves.
Reason why Word Perfect didn't have a GUI for windows: Other post
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
How could anyone forget Artisoft's LANtastic? WfW was so cludgy on release we stayed with Artisoft until Win 9x.
Legal precedents ARE NOT set by out of court settlements. That is the big problem with them. The suits continue without any legal platform until a judge rules in a case somewhere. Just like when RIAA started writting letters to ISP's demanding names of subscribers they wanted to sue, they continued the practice without anyone stopping them until verizon stood up and forced the courts to make a decision on this practice. Only after the 'legal' precedent was set did the action on RIAA's part actually stop. NOw they have to go to court themselves to garner a supeona before enumerating the suit with a defendant's name. The only way to legitimize a claim is to have it heard in court. Otherwise it is illigegitimate and without precednce. That is actually exactly the way MS wants it too. They don't want precedence set and therefore making it easier for them to be sued. NOw the next person who presents a suit carries the entire burden of proof and evidence where legal precedence would provide much of that for you.
Novell's lawsuits regarding DR-DOS?
Do not anger the worm.
It serves you correctly. (I still use WP5.1 every day.) And for those who couldn't remember the keystrokes, there was always the mouse-enabled menu (see my other post upstream in this thread).
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
And again, see other post The didn't lose it cause they didn't jump on the windows bandwagon, but cause MS would liscense them the GUI APIs.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
They have really deep pockets. They can afford to pay.
They might be able to afford to pay for a couple of these, but this sort of cash is going to hit any company in the world pretty hard, even one the size of Microsoft.
If they are trying to set a precedent, they'd better hope it doesn't take too many of these payouts...
It will be interesting to see how that stands up against companies offering free technology and selling support. My prediction is Microsoft will transition to an IBM style operation, maybe when the the dynamic duo of Gates and Balmer eventually pack it in.
Steve Balmer, is that you? I've only ever heard Microsofties use the term "eat your lunch".
Exactly. Novell brought WP not because it was the market leader (by then Word and Ami Pro had overtaken it), but because Novell wanted a cheap quick office suite to compete against Lotus and Microsoft with.
:-)'s
Wordperfect for Windows was a dog, theres more chance of finding a pro SCO supporter in a Linux User group than a good review of that product.
From memory Quatro has always been the runner up spreadsheet to 1-2-3 (and it could be argued that if Lotus hadn't got distracted with Improv, 1-2-3 would still be the market leader).
So we have a lawsuit settled that Microsoft could have won, a protagonist in its EU problems brought off, and we all know what companys that settle with Microsoft in their favour end up doing...... In other news Novells Linux architect/strategist moves on to other challenges
Wordperfect lost out to Word due to one plain and simple reason, GUI version. I still remember back in early 90s when people were still sticking to simple text mode WP without WYSIWYG v/s the appeal of word for windows. That plus the fact that word did try to help migration by providing same/simillar keystrokes, templates, conversion etc.
Also, microsoft has to patent their ideas lest someone else patents it and holds it for a ransom (we all remember the lawsuit on plugins) once it becomes commonplace.
WordPerfect is superior to Word in the same ways that Mozilla is superior to Internet Explorer. More relevant and modern features, greater stability, tabbed document views, better writing tools and extensions, export to PDF functionality, legacy compatibility modes (WP12 can be made to look and feel exactly like WP51/DOS). WP also has legal-specific functions that make it the standard among judges and lawyers.
It's also cheaper individually, and bigger businesses can do volume licensing deals with Corel.
WP is hands down a better product than Word. This is coming from a professional writer who has used both programs since their first versions. I'd use WP all day if I could, but WP for Linux kind of sucks, and I have this thing about not using proprietary software if a free alternative is available.
-Jem
It must be related, it cannot be just a coincidence.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
You're new here, aren't you?
(For the humor impaired, yes, I see his id number is lower than mine. It's a joke. Get over it.)
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
IIRC, on Windows, there is a daemon that handles this.
"Computer Browser" service: "Maintains an updated list of computers on the network and supplies this list to computers designated as browsers."
I know exactly how you feel.
The trouble is, for all the downfalls of Windows, I still wouldn't recommend Linux to anyone who isn't already very proficient in computers, has a lot of free time, and remembers DOS. This whole paradigm reminds me of the buzzword "killer app" that you used to hear so much, and not at all nowadays. That used to be Wordperfect, for those of us with short memories - it was that product which Microsoft destroyed that allowed Microsoft to succeed in the first place, because it alone justified the purchase of the computer.
Microsoft has spent the last ten years turning Windows itself into a killer app, and that is only magnified by Office. If Linux is ever going to gain any significant market share, it needs to be approximately as easy as windows, along with its current security superiority, have enterprise capabilities, and Star/OpenOffice needs to be clearly superior to MS Office.
Or, everyone will have to switch over when the security compromises reach some kind of critical mass and even looking at a WinPC means your identity has been stolen. I have a bottle of expensive vodka waiting for that day.
They have more IP and more patents than most software companies I should think.
If it came to a shake down they'd own all software companies in the world. Well, that was an exaggeration, but you get the idea.
The Internet is full. Go Away!!!
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.
AFAIK, the first viruses were spotted in 85-86 and they were on dos. The first 2-3 years were pretty quiet (well, there was the Robert Morris internet worm).
Then in the beginning of the 90s or so there were Brain, the Jerusalem-family, Michelangelo, and most notably the first kits, Dark Avenger and VCL. All for DOS/Windows. According to my memory, at this time viruses were already 'Microsoft country'.
So was the Mac virus hegemony between these periods, or does one of us have a memory fault?
Why should they? M$ didn't "innovate" on their own. The bulk of their products, new products anyway, are from purchased and sometimes "borrowed" code (JVM?). Why should that have carte blanche and everyone else have to "innovate?"
Microsoft Word has NEVER had the legal features that serious lawyers still need, which is why WordPerfect became so entrenched there.
Sure Bill Gates father was still using WordPerfect quite long into the game.
Blows a hole in your theory about WordPerfect dying because it sucked.
Word has always sucked, especially in a legal environment, but the war was never about a good implementation of features, but about control and forcing all industries to the same stupidity.
I had this conversation just a few days ago with lawyers who had current versions of Word which they knew how to use and have used for a long time, but still went back to WordPerfect to get many important things done. Word never properly understood, for example, a table of authorities, ir if it did, kept it a big secret.
Settlements do not set legal precedent. If the court doesn't rule on it, there
is no precedent.
I don't have a good feel for what this particular settlement really means. On
the one hand it could just be MS trying to clean off its plate, on the other
it could be that they were actually scared of going to court and simply gave
Novell what it wanted.
Just don't know.
*sigh* back to work...
As for poor user interface of keyboard-based WordPerfect, we have IBM to thank for that. A function-key-based user-interface was efficient in the days of "standard" keyboards when function keys were on the left. IBM came along and said that their PCs and Mainframes should have the same user interface, and moved the PC function keys across the top. This is what is called an "Enhanced" keyboard. If you've never used a "Standard" keyboard, you have no right to complain.
Even today Windows has remnants "Standard" keyboard legacy. ALT-F4 closes an application and ALT-F6 closes a child window within an application. Notice the keys are both even numbered -- that was because they were adjacent in the two-by-five arrangement of function keys on the left of a "Standard" keyboard.
I never stated that Lan Man came before Netware, was superior to Netware, or anything of that sort. However, id did predate WfW, was direct competition to NetWare, and was finally integrated for "free" into Windows WfW/NT, when MS decided they couldn't keep up with NetWare, and is still the foundation for NetBEUI under Windows today.
I don't know the details of the lawsuit, but if anything, the subsequent integration and "giving away with the operating system" of LanMan must have hurt Novell's business, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if this isn't part of the reason for the lawsuit in the first place
Any software application that basically required a function key explanation chart at the top of every keyboard was doomed when GUI took hold
That hasn't stopped Emacs...
*ducks*
--Muzz
With this suit novel gives up NetWare, dosent it seem strange that they give up NetWare only months after they have bought SuSE Linux?
TruePunk | Games
I guess that depends on your definition of "bundled." :-) Seriously, MS gave huge discounts on Windows to PC manufacturers that "bundled" Word with their hardware. WP was completely locked out. They couldn't get anyone to bundle WP with their computers. Since all these new computers came out with Word installed, no one needed to buy WP anymore. BTW, I'm not arguing that this was tne only thing that killed WP. There were many other contributers, including mismanagement on both WP and Novell's part. The fact that MS wouldn't make API's available to WP could be a contributing factor as well.
Those that can't innovate litigate.
Or those who don't have the money to buy out threatening innovative small companies and technologies. Or those who haven't made a monopoly out of a lie, a lot of luck, a poor ludibriated schmuck and millions of ignorant consumers.
I don't feel like it...
I agree. I just view Microsoft as evil, inherently. I only they had a hundred more such payouts then they could really feel it.
Well, I for one bought computers for a company around that time. We still had standardized on WordPerfect/Qpro and Paradox. Buying a computer from Gateway at the time highlighted MS bundling to me. Basically it ran soemthing like this - Gateway had a a machine with certain specs that met our requirements. Salesperson first ( the numebrs are not exact, but the gist is): "That will $1950." "Oh, ok. I see that MS Office is included with that." "yes" "We dont use MS office we use Wordperfect office, can we get that instead?" "Sure, that would be $2200". "Umm but WP office is cheaper than MS Office" "Well MS gives us a special deal". "Oh, ok. How much is the machine without MS Office?" "That would be $1950". "What?, It costs the same with office or wiotout?" "Yes, MS will not allow us to sell a machine cheaper. It is a special arrangement for using Windows." So if that doesn't constitute bundling, I do not know what is. Yes i know this is anecdoatal to everyone else - but it certainly happened to me. It certtainly showed that Microsoft's success at that time had little to do with superior product.
Your Internet ad was brought to my attention, but I can't figure out what, if anything, Compuglobalhypermeganet does, so rather than risk competing with you, I've decided simply to buy you out.
-- Bill Gates, "Das Bus"
% Homer and Marge quietly discuss this proposal.
Homer: I reluctantly accept your proposal!
Bill Gates: Well everyone always does. Buy 'em out, boys!
[Gates' lackeys trash the room.]
Homer: Hey, what the hell's going on!
Bill Gates: Oh, I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks! [insane laughter]
-- Bill Gates buys Homer's Internet company, "Das Bus"
Hmm.. you'd have to ask an OO.o developer. I know they have a filter, because Abiword is the test bed for OO.o's WP import feature. It works very well! Not sure why that hasn't been slipped into the main tree.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Dunno if anyone else remembers their own experience changing from WordPerfect to Word, but I was working in a large company's word processing department during their changeover. The only reason we switched -- and I mean the ONLY reason -- was because the large company got a great deal on Word 2.0 as part of a larger software bundle. Keep in mind we were using Lotus Notes for our email at the time. The person in charge was, at the time, excited, because they'd heard great things about Word.
Two things from that period stand out in my mind:
1. Word had a WordPerfect compatibility mode, if I remember correctly, that when activated would arrange the menus and keyboard shortcuts to match that of the Windows version of Word. I leaned on that quite a bit. I often wonder if something like that would help Linux desktop adoption (not trying to start a flamewar here!)
2. When Word 6.0 came out, we HATED it. We all had to get new computers in order to run it, and even then, it was painfully slow -- we tried everything to get the company to roll back to Word 2.0, but they told us the 6.0 upgrade was a mandatory thing as part of their licensing agreement with Microsoft.
Anyway, thought it might interest you.
> 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.
Not really. They did have a better product then WP (after trying and failing a few times first)
The lock-in only comes when they have a large enough marketshare and is used to not allow others to overtake them even if they'd have a theoretically better product.
> Innovate? Microsoft? Your kidding, right? Their only innovations have been with slimy business practices. No one can dispute their absolute genious there.
Their business is to create a strategy for getting peopel to repeatedly give them money, then go buy the technology for it one way or another (they do valid research also, but a lot of their products are bought from others)
Duh! Made a mistake in my above post -- "...keyboard shortcuts to match that of the Windows version of WORD" should of course say "...Windows version of WORDPERFECT".
Wordperfect died because Wordperfect for Windows sucked. I hate MS as much as the next guy, but seriously, Wordperfect for Windows was slow and buggy as shit.
While what you say about bundling is somethign I experienced as well (try to get vendors to preload OS/2 for example, which happened to be part of my job at the time), but around 1995, word was also a better product.
You must have missed the federal M$ anti-trust trial. Novel did not and did their part then. Now that the case is proved, the damages are being awarded. This case is only going to trial so far after the antitrust file because Novel has tried to settle in good faith. Good faith is generally a mistake when it comes to Microsoft.
WordPerfect missed the fucking boat on a lot of shit when it came to the migration from DOS to Windows ... How they expected to compete against Word was really beyond me. Any software application that basically required a function key explanation chart at the top of every keyboard was doomed when GUI took hold.
You must have also missed WP 5.2 for Windoze 3.1. It was out as early as anything dependent on business with a convicted predatory monopoly can be. Support for older methods, while adding new ones is called good product support and logical evolution.
Now, go wash your mouth out with soap before the feces in it multiply by fornication.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Microsoft has been trying to "clean its plate" for some time now, and yet lawsuits keep piling up like snow in Alaska. The reason for this is simple. Microsoft has a lot of money (they make a good target), and they have made some less than stellar decisions in the past. Add to that the fact that they are essentially a convicted monopolist and you have a situation that allows for a lot of softball lawsuits with the potential for a huge payout.
$536 million might be chump change for Microsoft, but it's a very healthy sum for Novell. Novell's Linux initiatives require an order of magnitude less R&D investment than Microsoft's initiatives. Novell can make this money go a very long way.
Microsoft settled because they are afraid of what would happen if this went to court. Microsoft has a lot of skeletons in its closet, and Novell's Netware went from having 70+% of the market to having considerably less than that. If a jury found that Microsoft had taken that marketshare illegally then the potential punishment could be very very substantial.
The first time I read it as "Evil" flag. I think there should be an evil distro, to compete with *BSD the operating system that keeps coming back from the dead and has a demonic icon.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
I used WP from the DOS version and really liked it. I only stopped using it after Novell acquired it and created WP or Windows and the horrible office suite bundle. They certainly messed up a fine product and sent it straight into the toilet. It was barely usable and completely unstable. And the install was a blast with random insertions of any of 36 floppy disks.
WordPerfect was the market leader prior to this and although I think they would have eventually lost to Office, Novell's efforts accomplished this in a few years where it should have been around longer. But they fucked it up so bad users deserted in impossibly huge numbers.
Then, after achieving this, they practically gave it to Corel. I have no problems with Novell's NOS product but they have not had a good track record with other apps at all.
MS did not need to flex any muscle here - Novell's incompetence did all the work!
come along and eat their lunch with just a few new features that the folks at WordPerfect were too lazy to implement.
IMHO Novell/Wordperfect has/had put out a much better product with the same if not better features than M$. Unfortunatelly, they lost all of their market share to M$, becuase in typicall M$ fashion, they spent a large fortune in marketing to get their products known. It wasn't that Novell was lazy, it was that Microsoft had a better marketing department and bigger marketing budget.
NetWare basically existed just to make up for the Windows networking components being shitty at the time.
Netware was around a lot longer than M$ was making NOS'es. They used to have 70% of the NOS market share. As for Windows networking components being shitty at the time, how has that changed from today? Don't get me wrong, they have come a long way, but once again, they rode Novell's coat tales by implementing a Director Service for their product (Of course the big red N stole NDS from LDAP. but I digress). I loved using NDS, unfortunatelly M$ stole their market share, and now I am stuck being a Windows Admin.
Tell me about it.
To this day, it takes me 20 minutes per attempt to get Word to do columns the way I want, not the way it wants.
I can do the same thing in WordPerfect in 30 seconds.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
And don't forget the forced incompatabilities that MS put into the OS. MS has looked at what APIs Wordperfect used and changed they way they worked between versions of the OS. Ooops it looks like your software is crashing. Ooops it looks like MS wins the benchmark race again.
Come on, $536 Million? Might as well be $536.00 for all it will affect Microsoft.
ACHTUNG! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen.
Any software application that basically required a function key explanation chart at the top of every keyboard was doomed when GUI took hold.
So many Slashdotters have the same experience with WP 5.1 as you do, which make me believe that they never actually used the product to any serious extent:
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS had a GUI (ncurses based, but never the less a GUI.).
WP 5.x had a menubar and drop down menus, and it could be controlled 100% by the mouse. One never needed to remember a single friggin keyboard shortcut. The function key overlay was for you convenience, it was never a necessary thing.
Yes, IBM was too slow to keep up. That's why IBM is number 9 on the fortune 500 list. IBM is doing just fine.
Yeah! More money to fund mono with!
http://www.go-mono.com
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.
Direct away from face when opening.
I thought that the ISODE Consortium invented LDAP. They're the ones credited on the RFC. One of their partners is Novell but that's a far cry from saying Novell invented Active Directory.
That's basically it's component that acts as the local master browser, you can operate without it. Read up on browser elections and all that crap in the SAMBA docs if you care more.
/mnt/tmp" "mount -t cifs //server/share/ /mnt/tmp -o Username=Administrator;Password=hithere" "nano /mnt/tmpshare/customer_notes.txt" "umount /mnt/tmp"
I don't care if it's a daemon or what, I just want to be able to peruse smb shares without a hassle. Setting up lisa on anything but the most simple networks is a hassle.
I open up a VPN to my office, and I want to browse the shares on the machines in the office. Lisa's whole "ping every machine evar" approach doesn't work, unless I'm supposed to have it constantly pinging an entire subnet that isn't currently connected?
I'll settle for being able to type \\server\share\customer_notes.txt and having the file just pop up on the screen, ready for editing and saving. If I need a password, it prompts me for one.
The fact that theres a network at all is transparent under windows. Right now under linux I have to do all this horseshit despite the fancy shmancy GUI: "mkdir
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Exactly. Novell brought WP not because it was the market leader (by then Word and Ami Pro had overtaken it), but because Novell wanted a cheap quick office suite to compete against Lotus and Microsoft with.
No, As I remember it, Novell bought WordPerfect because they wanted GroupWise. As soon as they could they sold the rest of the suite. They needed GroupWise to round out the Netware product.
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
europe violated about three of its precious fundamental human rights by booting out buitiglonni (sp?), a man who stated that he would only ever act within the confines of EU law regardless of personal opinion. how has the EU won anything, other than the craptatorship of the year award!
Exactly, and this is what enabled the transition between the typing/word processing "experts" (I.E. Secretaries) and now when we have managers doing their own typing and letter writing. Do you think that Joe Manager would have bothered learning the cryptic commands required to type a letter? No, he or she would have just sent it off to the secretarial pool to be done. As it was, she or he was able to fumble along and get the letter out the door in a more or less reasonable format.
Nowadays, you need to be a much higher level person to have an assistant than you used to. For better or for worse, the bad UI of Word enabled the shape of the office today.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
So what? At the time, niether WIndows nor Word was a monopoly. They were just another competitor in a world with 10-15 vibrant platforms and a dozen word processing packages. Lotus was openly hostile to Microsoft and its Windows platform, which they wanted to see done away with. The fact that MS killed WP isn't a crime.
Problem was that it was WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows competing against Word 95, and WordPerfect 6.0 for Windows was one screwed-up piece of work. Crashed a lot. Trouble with installation. Strange glitches with printing. I used it for a month of college, then switched to Word in desperation so I could get my paper in on time. And I'm a real geek. My aunt, who isn't a real geek, was calling me weekly with some glitch in her copy.
6.1 was better, but still barely usable. I never tried 6.2 or beyond. Sure, WordPerfect had great features, but Word did what I needed to do without crashing too often and without screwing up my whole system at install time.
Novell got behind at a critical point in the Word Processor Wars, and it cost them the industry. Too bad, so sad. They had a monopoly and they lost it, not vice-versa.
Same with Netware, if you ask me. Novell didn't go from 70% market share to (whatever it is now) by being the best. They were the best, but they got too far behind on Windows integration. Can't even start to tell you how many hours I wasted because the computer lab's login and file servers (Netware-based) were on the fritz. Again, by the time Novell got that fixed (I assume they got that fixed), they had lost a LOT of business. Sorry, dudes, you missed the boat.
Now, it looks like Novell is doing a lot of things right again. And maybe they can turn around. But they shouldn't be blaming Microsoft for their woes (er, I guess maybe they should, if it is an easy way to pick up a cool $500,000,000). They had a good thing going, but then they released crappy products (translation: worse than Microsoft's) for too many years in a row. Tough beans.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
"Novell is "reinventing" themselves as a Linux company."
So basically, they're selling commodity technology created elsewhere. This reinvented company sounds more like a retailing company than a technology one. Sounds pretty dead to me.
Your memory of that time is different than mine. I don't think OEM's bundled MS Office much in those days.
For one thing, WordPerfect was the market leader not MS Word. Also spreadsheets were not commonly used for non-accounting purposes in those days.
Most OEM's were competing on price and basic features like how much RAM and Disk space they had. The last thing they would want to do was jack up the price by hundreds of dollars with an expensive software suite that probably wouldn't fit on the hard disk of most of their systems.
Funny how hundreds of companies didn't have these problems when programming for Windows. Wordperfect for Windows crashed a lot on its very first version. How was MS able to look at which APIs Wordperfect for Windows used before it was released?
You're going to have to give me a lot more specific info and timelines before I'd buy into your claim.
Wordperfect for Windows didn't work properly under Windows 3.0 and 3.1, Windows 95 wasn't required.
MS Word won the competition with Wordperfect long before Novell had anything to do it. It was over even before Corel owned it.
Doesn't matter who won, the point I'm trying to make, is that they are better products and M$ has a better marketing department.
Konqueror and paths like
smb://server/share/customer_notes.txt
works perfectly for me every time.. if there is a password it prompts me for one
I would think that the crowd that would want to learn keyboard shortcuts for everything and would like to be able to do real typesetting jobs would be more interested in an editor + TeX combination. And TeX is platform independent and open source.
Disclamer: I use emacs + elatex to write/typeset all my papers (plain english, linguistics (excelent trees) and math (excelent formulas))
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
LDAP is not the same as AD. They share some common features but AD does more than implement the RFC. LDAP = Lightweight Directory Access Protocol as was based on the X.500 protocol as I recall. But it was "lighter" for the web. LDAP has been implemented all over the place on many different OSes. See http://www.gracion.com/server/whatldap.html for some history on LDAP. AD=Active Directory which is a MS ONLY service, and it controls a whole lot more than LDAP does, such as setting your PC security, firewall configurations, access permissions, etc. Last time I looked AD had something like 300 plus configuration settings for an NT box.
I haven't used WordPerfect for many years, perhaps it's better now. I didn't like the DOS versions (long before I used MS Word, by the way) and the early Windows version was buggy, so I'm not likely to try it now. That ship has already sailed.
You missed the point of this. Microsoft deliberately locked out a Novell product from their operating system and then refused to allow them the information to make it work thus killing it off. That's not innovation. The people controlling the OS intentially broke a product that runs on that OS in order to hurt that company. We know they have done it before. This time they had to pay for it. FYI eDirectory is still a far superior directory compared to Active Directory. Doesn't matter if it's running on Netware, Windows or Linux. (And it will run under all 3 unlike AD)
Not true. Microsoft Bob was an innovation. One developed totally in house. And we can see how well that did :)
The old DOS WordPerfect 5.1 was based around remembering complex combinations of Function keys. Very powerful if you had the right kind of mind to remember the Secret Codes. Or had that nifty template. Hell to teach to Beginners though. Anyway, with that in mind, I could understand it would have been popular to Linux users.
Zenworks, and eDirectory. Both are multi platform. Even groupwise can be run under Netware, Windows and Linux. Personally I think the coolest thing in Netware from an END USER perspective is iPrint. I have all of my buildings set up on a web site with building maps. There are printer icons on those maps and users can just find their printer on the floor plan and click it and it installs.
Back when the SuperSet crew (Drew Major and company)
picked up the remnants of a (I think M/PM company)
there wasn't much else out there except Corvus Omninet (grits teeth). You wouldn't want to network with that. Ah the joys of 8" winchester
hard disks and shared *disk* (not file serving)
networks.. Ugh. Programmers had to do their own semaphores to arbitrate access at *apps* level.
Sucky huh?? My good fried Jon used to keep a
St.Christopher on his corvus drive because the
darned things would head crash if u even tapped
the table...
Novell changed all of that.
But not only that, Novell always had a very good philosophy towards the little folks (like me and others) out there who needed tech support. They were techies just like us, and they cared. Netware
was never very pretty, but so long as you didn't
overload it with NLM's it was *rock* solid.
Fine people. (and they are doing it again by backing SuSE/Miguel and the mono crew and everyone else).
Still, just like MS they didn't quite grok TCP/IP
but nobodies perfect right...
Re Active directory (sic): most of it (esp the DFS part was trivial to do thanks to the splendid Andrew Tridgell's Samba even in the mid 90's.
I admire the best MS engineers. They've taught me a lot. But, I loath their management.
To anyone who doesn't know that execrable outfit that calls itself SC something used to be Calde**
and was founded by Ray Noorda (ex Novell).
I think if you spend 90% of your time working with a single application, memorizing command-line and function key combinations make sense (of course, for many DOS applications there was no choice).
I think one of the reasons that Unix fans cling so strongly to familiar tools is that they don't want to learn a lot of new keystrokes and keywords despite the fact that they celebrate the command-line. It's the command line one already knows that is powerful.
However, there's still the matter of Eolas and the "use form tags, violate our IP" patent 5,838,906. Will Microsoft buy off/out Eolas and truly "own the Internet," or will the patent be found invalid? PHBs and geeks would like to know.
Perhaps clearing all of these lawsuits by "throwing money at them" (including the pending WordPerfect lawsuit by Novell) is the best return for shareholders; why bother with developing innovative operating systems or office automation software, or at least fixing the bugs in the current one, when you're a monopoly?
Then again, maybe Gates and Ballmer developed a ethical side and couldn't sleep at night, knowing how they wronged other businesses in the past. Nah. A couple of billion bucks in the bank would put most people's conscience to sleep.
I wasn't talking about LDAP. I was more referring to parts of AD that seem inspired by stuff I had seen in Novell Directory Services.
"Where do you think Microsoft got the "inspiration" for Active Directory, among other things?"
x500 the same as Novell did.
I joke, NDS rocked, and possibly still does.
My memories of NDS Manager tell me MS Active Directory Users and Computer sucks.
Netcraft confirms it. BSD^H^H^HNovell is dying.
This statement is forty-five characters long.
Microsoft is the poster boy for patenting anything and everything
*cough*
IBM may have something to say about that...
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
AN/"international business machines": 37931 patents.
Remember - Microsoft was a tiny company once. They couldn't price people out of the market or use their weight when they only had 30 employees. They are the most popular, as they offer the best balance of price, functionality, and effectiveness. Of course, you can bitch/moan/whine about how bad MS is, but they're still producing everything the OSS community is trying to emulate. If the OSS community is so much more inspired than Microsoft, how come linux is constantly playing catch-up to windows? I don't get it. You can't have it both ways.