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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."
perhaps SCO went after the wrong people ?
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"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!
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
And "monopoly" would imply *lack* of choice. People used WP by choice back then even more than now -- in WP's heyday, WP had direct competition from Wordstar, MultiMate, and numerous other word processors of varying capability. WP cornered what was then a very competitive market because of several factors:
:)
1) support for every printer known to man
2) features that users wanted (notably, features for lawyers, which no other product bothered to include)
3) excellent free tech support for one and all (legal user or not)
4) Reveal Codes (the ultimate timesaver for complex documents)
WP only lost the market lead by being slow and lame to the Windows bandwagon, and I think more critical, by radically reducing their free tech support.
Until WPWin8, where WP got its Windows act back together, WinWord was prettier to look at, but Word has *never* been superior in any way, and as you say about file formats -- lordy!!
BTW, tho I have (and use, and collect) most WP versions, I still use WP5.1 as my everyday workhorse, and I lurk on the WP OO.o mailing list.
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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.
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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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?