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Novell vs. Microsoft, Again
belmolis writes "As they promised, Novell has filed suit against Microsoft over WordPerfect. Here's the complaint, and here is Microsoft's press release in response. From what I know of the history, it seems very likely that Novell will be able to prove that Microsoft engaged in illegal anticompetitive behavior. Indeed, the complaint cites some of the same acts that figured in the US government case against MS. What isn't so clear to me is how much of the loss of market share they will be able to show was Microsoft's fault, since there seems to be a diversity of opinion regarding the relative quality of WordPerfect and MS Word."
Reader tekiegreg points out Reuters' story on the new suit, as carried by Yahoo!.
They just need enough evidence to get a settlement. I doubt MS will let it get to court.
Hey, if you can't win once, sue again, right? It is the American way after all.
I don't know if Microsoft engaged in anti-competitive behavior but I do know that Novell probably nailed the coffin shut themselves with Word Perfect for Windows. That early implementation was so horrible switching to Word was an act of self-preservation.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
Hehe.
Money is the main motivator for Novell, so they are neither the good or the bad guys, they are a potentially usefull ally to others who are into open source software to make money, and to the open source community (whatever that may be)
And as can be seen, they can also be a pain in the ass if they happen to have an issue with you and think they can get some money out of it.
At the time that Novell took over the Wordperfect line, it was a vastly superior product in comparison to Word. WP was very consistent and reacted to various situations with expected behavior...bulleted lists, numbered lists, indentation. It was so much better than Word that is was the defacto word processor of choice for both the legal and medical industries for years to come...mainly because legal and medical documents demanded predictable formatting. Even today I find Word autoformatting in weird or unexpected ways...
-h3dge
Is it really that time again for another antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft? Geez, at the rate they are piling in, Microsoft might as get out while the gettings good. Not that many people here would mind...
It doesn't matter if they can prove it. Microsoft will just write them a check that amounts to less than 1% of their war chest. Microsoft will continue breaking laws because no enforcement technique can control them.
"brxref
It looks like the majority of their complaints come about because Microsoft didn't document the hooks in shdocvw that IE is using, which meant that they couldn't integrate web browsing into wordperfect...
They also claim that Microsoft represented Windows 95 as a 32 bit operating system even though it wasn't. Which is a wierd claim.
I thought the government anti-trust case meant that nobody else had to prove that Microsoft had engaged in such activities.
Given that Microsoft has been clearing the decks by settling a lot of issues out of court (including one with Novell), I wonder why they decided to fight this one.
I heard at the time (when Windows started making the rounds as a gadget on top of MS-DOS), that Microsoft had pleaded with the big MS-DOS third-party software suppliers to port their office programs to Windows, and they had showed little interest or downright declined. They wanted to wait till that "Windows" thing was a success before they committed themselves to anything. So MS, knowing that in the absence of an office suite, the success of Windows was almost impossible, decided to develop the office suite themselves, and the rest is history. Is that true? Has anybody heard of it or knows more about that particular issue?
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
I'm going to buy the new Suse tomorrow.
Not that I'm a big Suse fan, but I simply like Novel better every day.
Go get them tiger!
i find it interesting that the first card ms has pulled out (in their press release) is the statute of limitations... ianal, but the _actual_ time the clock starts ticking could actually be argued? plus, if that really is a limitation, then novell could file in a state that has a higher cap on the SOL?
WordPerfect was a damn good program. WP sold out to Novell, then Novell sold out to Corel. And through either incompetence (or perhaps due to MS), it died while a child of Corel.
Microsoft Word has always had a whole help section dedicated to getting Wordperfect users to like Word better, and explains the differences between the two.
.doc format.
And, ironically, Microsoft's WordPerfect history fact sheet is in the Word
It seems to me Novell has a major problem differentiating the words "using" and "abusing."
it is no longer a "free market" if 1 person is pulling the strings; which is what they (novell) hopes to prove in court... ... you lost on the non-free market, try to get compensated in court; in the process, try to get the market free (as should be)
In my country, if a criminal commits crimes repeatedly, he gets a bigger sentence... why doesn't this seem to apply to cooperations?
:)
I think the whole lot of Microsoft should've been jailed for a couple of life times by now
Hmm, then again, Microsoft settles alot...
"It ain't done, until Lotus won't run."
True then, probably true now.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Those of you like me who have been Novell shops since the dawn of time, do remember how Microsoft screwed Novell so many times years ago. Purposely putting code in NT support packs to slow down the Netware client(has been documented), amongst many other things. I am glad Novell will finally see their vengeance with these 2 lawsuits. And of course we have NLD, groupwise for linux is taking off, and Netware for Linux due in February.
This is just a tactic to get revenue. This law suit is very late, they should have done that at that time. Also, they don't own WordPerfect anymore. I'd expect Corel to sue them.
1) Invent phoney product
2) Let phoney product lose to dormant product
3) Sue leading company
4) ????
5) PROFIT!!
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
This is just stupid.
..." (Sec. 7, Page 3, from the complaint).
If you read Novell's complaint they mention Microsoft's integration of IE into windows, which was the reason WordPerfect failed.
Browsing has nothing to do with word processing, and I just don't buy that "... the integration of browsing functions into Windows, coupled with Microsoft's refusal to publish certain of these functions was a primary strategy for excluding Novell's application
I believe they're just trying to piggyback on the Anti-trust law suite that was filed against MicroSoft by the US government.
I'd be very surprised if the court would even consider their claims.
Novell, be happy with the 500 something million dollars you got for Netware and move on!
If you can't mod them join them.
Um, yeah, what planet are you on?
There's a reason that many law firms STILL use WordPerfect 5.1 to this day, and that's 'cause Word is horrendous when it comes to heavily formatted documents.
And I'll never cease to get annoyed at its tendency to tack on a blank page at the end of any document where the text terminates near or at the end of a page.
-Jenn
Nice way to chew off one piece at a time.
Glad to see Novell feisty again. It's clear they are right and are owed damages. On a side note, our company ditched MS this year and went back to Novell. Security was the main concern as well as spiralling costs of supporting MS servers. It's kind of cool to see Novell servers in all the locations again, like it used to be.
nt
What surprises me most in reading the last few entries, especially given the usual hatred toward MS that most slashdotters share, is the sympathetic view with MS that WordPerfect died simply because it was an inferior product.
Now, this may partially be true, but MS has a documented history of forcing business partners to nullify contracts with companies that make products that could compete with Microsoft's. This is a huge problem, and very easily could lead to the death of a product. Using their contracts with IBM as an example, if MS demands that IBM no longer sell PCs with WordPerfect as the word processor, and threaten to yank all Windows licenses if they do not comply, two things happen: 1. IBM drops WordPerfect out of necessity, given that 95% of desktops run Windows and that IBM cannot sell a PC without it, and 2. Wordperfect dies a quick death. If losing a contract with IBM, which would have guaranteed hundreds of thousands of sales, is not enough, then they die as the same MS strong-arm techniques are applied to other PC manufacturers like Sony, Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc.
The net result? Wordperfect heavily declines by being illegally muscled out of its main business. Then, with no fresh capital, it cannot integrate newer and more innovative features that consumers demand, and eventually dies from being unable to compete. In the end, Microsoft blames a poor product, while in reality illegal and anticompetitive business practices killed it long before.
When will the US government impose a worthwhile and equitable penalty that actually means something to a company with nearly 50 BILLION in cash saved up?
Is some poor bastard going to get screwed on copyright violation if people forget the "!"? Similarly, if court ducuments omit the "!", does this render claims invalid?
Maybe people should start putting odd, difficult-to reproduce keyboard characters into their company names.
Yeah, tell me about it. I heard about this case on NPR more than a full day before I read this story here.
Sleep is futile.
Any idiot who makes a dancing, annoying, "aide" such as clippit the paperclip deserves to be sued
Novell vs. Microsoft, Again
As they promised, Microsoft has filed suit against Novell over Mono.
Why doesn't Novell donate WP to the LGPL so it can be put into OpenOffice? I am sure there must be some part ( the non buggy parts ;) ) that could be useful.
If a project is going to go bankrupt might as well replease it as a GPL, you've really have little to lose, which is why I was diapointed that 321 studios didn't release their copying software before shutting down.
How on earth can WP complain about lack of hooks into IE, when the WWW (well, the browser portion) didn't even exist in 1991-1992 !!
And if you do a help/about in IE, it says copyright 1995-2004
Wow, I clicked on the link in the parent article and learned a new word: Dowloand :)
"# Dowloand Novell's November 12 Antitrust Filing Against Microsoft"
All I can say to Novell... Get em!
Doesn't that make it a monopoly? That's the percent Windows had at the time it was considered a monopoly.
The calculator I wrote in BASIC didn't sell too well due to actions of Microsoft. I demand you pay me.
Seriously. These lawsuits are getting fucking crazy. It seems that every product which has failed will eventually seek damages from Microsoft. Sure, some of their business tactics are shady, but they work. When aiming for maximum profit, why wouldn't a company seek to enter into new, profitable markets? These business practices, such as withholding information, are good ones. Hell, if I owned a business, I'd engage in similar tactics!
I guess lawsuits are good for making up profit losses too. It's just a more public form of underhanded tactic.
First, defense contractors frequently start with a windoless building at the low end of their security scale. So clearly your collegues didn't take security as seriously as you imply.
How many police reports were filed? How many newspaper editorials written? How many lawsuits filed after apprehending the guys in the parking lot? Former employees sued? After all what's the incentive for keeping it a secret war? The public would love the spectical, and everyone would love the publicity. Then, who did Novell send over to the Microsoft campus? Let's say I take you at your sentiment, and accept that no one did. They had it demonstrated that the rules of the game are thus, and then in the interests of personal integrity they decide not to follow suit. Commendable, but if someone decided to fight dirty you'd better be more talented. It might take two people to have a fight, but it only takes one to deliver an ass-whooping. Then was it in the interests of personal integrity that they let Mircosoft slide back then? Are the too poor to afford personal integrity now? And finally, if they are, who's fault is that? Microsoft fought them for a market which by even your account Novell didn't want to fight for. And you even attribute the act of not fighting for a market as competition? Is Microsoft one company, under Gates, for bitches and by bitches after all? Yeah. And your complaint is that they didn't roll over faster that the wordperfect crew. Give up and die works about as well for programs as it does in the marketplace. In fact it's just behind, "Hurry, let's cobble together some awful crap, that works just well enough to infuriate but not enrage our customers, hoping no one looks and it gets fixed in the coming decade."
Microsoft didn't kill Wordperfect, complacency did. Hell, Microsoft even got the better name.
Amicus, HotDocs and Deal Proof links disappeared with the legal suite. Though some legal-specific features were retained in WordPerfect 2002, the legal suite enjoyed great popularity and its demise undermined Corel's standing with lawyers, especially solos and small firms, which liked the bundled third party legal software."
Shackled to Microsoft: What It Means To The Legal Profession (2002)
Apparently Novell people use MS word (or at least the MS word file format)...
Accrued interest can als be factored in.
Can you say "break the bank"?
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I read the pdf most of it is just a rehash of the government vs microsoft antitrust case where ms was found to be a monopoly and behave in an anticompetitive manner. A large chunk of the document references this over and over again.
They complain about missing API etc but no specifics, then again we all know what happens when you use undocumented functions.. they become incompatible in later oses. I imagine their complaints are based on the reasoning, "You published API's to open/save/print documents in windows 3.11, but it didn't work properly when windows 95 was released", it could be true but this problem affected the millions of other software that were rendered incompatible in the move to windows 95. Hell even moving from win98 or winXP introduced compatibility problems.
I'm betting they are hoping for a settlement, they aren't going to win anything in this case.. but then again when your business runs on giving shit away, your source of revenue tends to come from lawsuits.
did you forget to take your meds?
They're called anti-trust laws.
Instead of stating 'no enforcement technique can control them', perhaps you should be asking 'Why has the government failed at enforcing existing anti-trust laws'.
Should politics really have the control they do over the enforcement of laws?
And should business have the control it does over politics?
The fact that a single business can make a big contribution to a political party and then get away from federal procecution is nothing short of a scandal. The fact that it's not is one of the biggest things which irritates me about US politics today.
The american people seem to have reached a kind of point where they've completely quit looking forward and outward on ways to improve their society. Any long-term issue in US politics is treated as if it was insolvable. When the international perspective shows that the problem is actually US-specific, and that it has been solved elsewhere, we shrug and say 'Ah, well that's over there. The US is different.'
The USA is not fundamentally different. It's yet another democratic market-economy in a world with dozens of them. Sure the USA is unique in ways. Sure there are cultural differences, and political differences and so on. But that doesn't mean that there are no solutions.
It means that people are disregarding them, because, ultimately, they don't want things to change.
Ok, end of rant.
Then we merged with another department who were MS Word users. The new head of department demanded that everyone use MS Word. His justification was that they made the operating system and so the office package must be the best. All the WordPerfect users were forced to switch. They were stunned at how awkward many functions were in MS Word, the lack of power, the interference of the automatic features, and the numerous bugs. I have had to replace a couple destroyed keyboards from users that went ape over the frustrations of using MS Word. They switched to MS Word 7 years ago and they still complain.
The university made a deal with Microsoft so that we could install Office on any university system we wanted and staff could use it on home computers for free. WordPerfect can't match it. To make matters worse, Corel have dramatically increased the price on the academic edition of WordPerfect and the money people won't let me buy a single copy.
Pretty much, the whole world uses MS Office these days. For anyone else who has used any other product, you KNOW that something is wrong when something so mediocre has total market dominance.
You should have been modded "wasn't born yesterday".
The tone of Microsoft's tone seems to indicate they are totally grumpy over this. Normally they have a more positive take, maybe they aren't up for a good 'ol lawsuit anymore.
WHY OH WHY do law firms, of all people, need heavy formatting? NOBODY needs heavy formatting except graphic artists, and especially not people making official documents!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Microsoft files antitrust suit against itself.
Do you actually laugh like "hehe" in real life, or is it just some typing that you picked up? It sounds REALLY girly. I can just imagine you with your index finger in your mouth, trying to act cute as you giggle "hehe" before going into the rest of your post. I find it surprising that you'd preface a serious point with a cutesy laugh like that.
I work in the IT deparment of a 250-user engineering firm where WordPerfect is the standard office suite and, if someone needs it, they'll have MS Office installed. This is both because the users are used to it and because WordPerfect is cheaper. I personally have never heard a peep from anyone about office other than the 'How do I do this?' kind of thing. WordPerfect on the other hand probably accounts for about 30% of the total problems I'm faced with. In public school I was using WordPerfect! It's time to let it die.
Several years ago we were using wp and upgraded to the next version (wp 6?) and it would crash often and have a nasty habit of trashing your original document file on a daily basis.
So we moved to ms word, which didnt crash quite so often and didnt trash your document unless it was a full moon.
If only open office existed then.
At my current employer we use ms office and it doesnt crash, but does very weird things when formatting text, setting up templates is a nightmare and dde/ole gets to be REAL pain in the ass when trying to read excel files.
A couple of weeks ago i got work to dump office and go for open office.
1. Formatting works fine and templates tend to just work
2. I converted a few examples of our dde/ole progs using ms-office to python/xml/dom using open office spreadsheets. all the developers loved it.
3. The killer feature everyone loved was the export to PDF.
4. The UK spell checker isnt great. ok it sucks. but 1,2 & 3 convinced almost everyone and at $0 per seat it convinced everyone.
wp sucked, the best at the time for us was ms
ms sucks, the best for us now is open office
jumps with joy!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
M$ has all the dude judges paid off Monopoly rules in the world with crappy products.
It makes me sick. It seems to be the industry standard these days that if you have a failing comapny, find someone rich to blame and try to sue them.
If you can't beat them, sue them.
People should take responsibility for their actions. Someone screwed up at Novell and they want to pass the buck. Ethics right out the window.
Jamey Kirby
It's just money talks and bullshit walks.
MS earn so much money from all over the world and US gov just tax them to correct it.
I don't think there is any rational reason to shut MS down.
6.1 was a great WP. Post 6.1 they got caught up in trying to compete against MS's Full suite and didn't transition to Win32 ie Win 95 that well. They lost out big time by waiting so long to produce a fully "32 bit" version of their suite while Office 95 was out right away and without piracy guards got installed on every corp PC in the world. Maybe MS withholding technical info factored in here? Assuring that in the new Win32 world Novell would never be able to compete on equal footing with Microsoft? Guess we will find out.
My concern is if Novell pushes MS hard enough, MS will strike back with a huge patent offensive against Novell's Linux business. Of course that might be MS's eventual goal all along so maybe pushing Microsoft to sue before they are ready is part of the game.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The reason Microsoft is not vilified while Enron is would be that Microsoft is still profitable and making their stockholders money. If Enron had been able to continue playing money games, keeping themselves alive and their stock price rising for another ten years, most of us still wouldn't have heard of them. If Microsoft should someday implode as a direct result of their shady practices, then you will see them vilified. Until then, they're simply being "punished for success".
The enemies of Democracy are
Correct. Legal documents have no formatting to speak of (I've reviewed my fair share). So the argument about formatting is bunk. There are only two products in the history of computing that are worse than word perfect. Both of those also come from Novel. This lawsuit is without merit and is just more spilt milk. Does this sound familiar: Company had successful product but screwed it up. Who to blame? Their own incompetence? Nope. Easier to blade Microsoft.
Frankly, I've never ran either one.
First off, there is not any great amount of M$ software at this location, windoze is not allowed on the premises.
Second off, I have a copy of WordPerfect 8 here, sitting on the shelf, never been installed. Paid $75 for it with taxes and all.
Why isn't it installed? Well, lets just say that in Corels infinite paranoia, they made gawd damned sure it would only run on one specific linux, theirs, of a certain release only and untouched by human hands for any updates etc.
But they didn't say that on the box of course because that would have torpedoed what sales they had. When I found it wouldn't install on RedHat by straceing the installer, I took it back to the store,and was basicly told to go pound sand, the box has been opened so we cannot refund.
Of course the fscking box was opened, how the hell else was I supposed to find out if it would install? Some sort of magic xray eyed genie to peek at the tracks on the cd and see if it would work? Mmm, well lets just say that those are in somewhat short supply around here, they are all out watching what J-Lo and Ben are up to next.
As far as I'm concerned, Corel, now Novell, owes me 75 bucks. Or a working copy of WordPerfect 8.
No Cheers this time, Gene
Everytime Word Perfect comes up this gets mentioned and a thread goes on about it's merits and nothing gets done.
One of the linux wordprocessors should really implement this feature.
When I was young, I cut my teeth on paperclip and that processor out of compute's gazette (I'm sure someone will chime in and say it's name) on my c64.
Back then, there was no wysiwyg or preview of the document for that matter (well some had preview later). You created your documents using the codes for bold, page break, bullets, etc.
This gave you total control of your document. Wordperfect for dos continued this tradition but somewhere along the way it got lost in most gui wordprocessors.
Think of it like only being able to make a web page in dreamweaver and not be able to use a text editor.
Yes, Word has a limited reveal codes, and some others did as well. But it always seemed to hide some document controls from you and invariably this is when you needed to fix something and it becomes frustrating finding where this weird page break, or margin change was actually happening.
Bottom line for me, I don't care about word and haven't for a long time, but for the open office, kwrite, abiword developers out there: Please impliment this feature. Surely, one of you must be old enough to remember the old way word processing was done, and recognize that the feature still has value.
There's a reason that many law firms STILL use WordPerfect 5.1 to this day, and that's 'cause Word is horrendous when it comes to heavily formatted documents.
Nope. Try again. Legal documents have almost zero formatting.
And I'll never cease to get annoyed at its tendency to tack on a blank page at the end of any document where the text terminates near or at the end of a page.
Wow. That's a pretty basic thing to prevent from happening. Just as simple option.
Don't forget the fiasco of having saved doc info that can be recovered from the .doc format code. Can you imagine a lawyer who incorrectly used a past perfect modifier, then corrected it on edit, only to find out that his original draft was still available in the document formating? This is the reason some computer savee law firms still use wordperfect.
Both Novell and MS suck at one point or another.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Really? Explain it, me and many others have missed it?
what sort of legal documents are you talking about? courts have very specific rules about pleadings, etc.
It's interesting that 90% of the desktop business community uses Word, but lawyers (no bastion of technology prowess) choose to use WP.
I can vouch for Word Perfect. I used the very first version of Word Perfect for Windows, WP5.2 and thought it was just fine. Like you, I've seen whole office buildings switched by force by the same clueless logic and with the same results. The formating of printed documents was hoplessly screwed and efficiency too a nose dive. I've also worked companies that were Word from the get go. They had the same formatting problems, but had them for much longer. The quality difference was extreme to anyone who ever used a word processor to type anything with so much as a table in it. Word still sucks at this. Word still screws formating and Word still won't let you see the codes to correct the stupid automagic errors Word puts into your stuff for you.
Even if all of the secretaries I know are wrong and Word is "better", the fines should be heavy. The best program in the world was unable to stand on a M$ platform with M$ against it. Microsoft should be fined for their intent and punished in a way that makes people think twice about doing the same thing. The damages should be maximal.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
> Don't forget the fiasco of having saved doc info that can be recovered from the .doc format code
WordPerfect has the same problems. People found a lot of juicy deleted footnotes in the "Starr Report" on Clinton's sex life.
WP 5.1 for dos was the first truly good word processor. Everything since has been a modified copy, or clone.
Just like all spread sheets are derivitives of Lotus 123 R2.?.
Ther is no new software being written, it was all done 10 years ago, we just modify it.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Give me Wordperfect = 5.0 any day. Oh, the good ole days of DOS, XtreeGold file manager, and Wordperfect, all on an 8088.
Yeah.
May the threads progress competently.
Relax, zealot.
TeX or LaTeX may fill the hole in your life.
Sitting in the parking lot with binoculars, writing down code snippets? Are you f'ing insane? Either you made that up, or you naively believed some lunatic rumor that was being spread around.
In fact, your first two paragraphs are complete BS. Parent needs modded DOWN DOWN DOWN bigtime.
<tin foil hat>Lobbyists and corporation campaign contributions.</tin foil hat>
Spare everyone your crazy lies. You don't even believe yourself.
I remember times when WP was THE way to do any "real" text formatting... (it sucked but hey it was the only choice)
/. readers know the alternatives (with me included), but addmit (or ague me), that most people u meet/know the internet is the blue-ish E icon on their desktop, and any formatted text is W on paper sheet...
As the world started to move in MS direction, there where allways alternatives, but again hey... MS pulled it of with office suite (not that i would make any whosrhip of MS products), but companies adopted them becouse of the bundle offers, and people seemed to take the MS stuff as the default accomodation on a computer.
Take for example the scools that learned people how-to use computers... win 3.1 or later on win95 and so on... with all the way MS products... For the average John Doe it's MS all the way since then.
Novell is just making their point (better late then never), and face it MS is gonna pay them out before Court even thinks of their charges agains MS.
EU got their (a bit less than) 500 millions Eur. , for the monopoly behaviour on market in EU. And it doesn't seem to bother the Redmond giant.
IMO MS has no real problem with law inforcements, since average John Doe thinks PC can do internet browsing (IE for most of them), document or some (U name'it) text editing for Word or Office suite, and the universe of PC is named Windows.
I know most (alot) od
my 0.02$ to the whole circus, that aint gonna change sometime soon...
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
Yeah right, like I'm gonna listen to some guy with a greased up yoda doll up his ass.
a Fucktard. Were you there? I suggest you go back to using SAMNA and STFU. or EZWriter.
For what it's worth, I was a die-hard WP user when 4.2 was around, and even a little bit when 5.0 and 5.1 was new. This was in my senior year of high school.
The computer lab at school had MS Word on it - the "brand new" version which I think was 2.0. It sucked big time and I refused to use it.
Sometime later, I think when Windows/Office 95 came out, I ran across Word again and used it to make a quick document. WYSIWYG was new to me, and I actually liked using it.
Also at that time, WP came out with 6.0 which was horrendous. It was slow, uninteresting to look at, hard to use, bulky, and had too many bugs to deal with.
Needless to say, soon after I switched from being a WP snob to a Word snob.
-David
The api's for the OS that microsoft published to 3rd parties were a lot buggier and slower than the hidden api's that word used.
This made competitors software products appear to crash more and not work as well.
This is part of how they leveraged their illegal monopoly.
...but I'm with Microsoft on this one.
:-)
Between 1989 and 1992 I worked for a large international company. During this time there was a project to unify the computer environment. This project early on saw the potential of Windows 3 and committed to using it already before it had gone out of beta. We of course needed office software, and I got to test word processing programs.
We were a wordperfect shop then and really wanted a windows version, but although we never doubted that Windows 3 would be a hit, Wordperfect obviously made a different judgement on that. There was no Windows version, and nothing was in the pipeline. This forced us to choose between the other available programs. I rember that the contest was between Ami Pro and Word for Windows. Nothing else was even remotely usable. Word won, but just as we were going to commit to Word, Wordperfect finally saw the light. So, we didn't commit to Word. We didn't commit at all, but instead we used Word until Wordperfect for Windows came out, intending to switch back.
I don't remember exactly how long it took, maybe it was a year later that I got to see a beta version of Wordperfect for Windows. This late beta was so buggy that it was completely unusable. Did we give up? No. We waited for the final version.
When it finally came, not only was everybody now happily using Word, the final version of Wordperfect for windows was crap. It was a useless pile of garbage, where the best way to edit a document was to go into the code-view that made it work exactly like Word Perfect for DOS. The WYSIWYG mode was rather "What You See Is Nothing Like What You Are Trying To Get". The program was confusing and hard to use.
When I first started using Word, I missed that code view, and checked that lack off as a minus. Pretty soon it was apparent that with Word, you did not need it. With Wordperfect, it was a necessity.
So what killed Wordperfect was not Microsoft, but a double blow of bad decision making and crappy software, delivered hard and fast by Word Perfect itself. Novell buying Wordperfect in 1992 was a mistake. As simple as that, and now they are trying to blame Microsoft. Pitiful.
I hope Microsoft takes this to court, and I hope they win. If they need a witness, I'm game!
this is all a load of horse shit.
there are too many people paid or brainwashed by microsoft who frequently post on this site for me to even read the articles about microsoft. everyone knows microsft deserves to be dismantled.
seriously, i am sick of astroturf on slashdot. i grew up with this site and am really saddened to see that big companies just have their ways with the boards here. it used to not be like that.
its impossible to tell if someone here is genuine. one guy says he worked for word perfect and has the real scoop, while what seems to be a number of other people, mostly anonymous at that, are dismissing his claims without regard for the possibility of them being true. dismissing them with FUD kind of shit that really does remind me of some of the shit that flows from ballmers mouth himself.
i wouldnt put anything past microsoft, and you are a fool if you would. open your eyes or shut your mouths - dignity follows in either case.
our judicial system is a sick joke. it boils down to money and thats the only thing you need to know going into the courtroom. you can be completely innocent of an accusation but if you are broke you are as good as guilty. if you have a shitload of money, welcome to the land of the free.
all of you sociopathic pigs out there who sit here plugging away with your misleading posts can go fuck yourselves, and each other. you have no idea what it means to be human, no idea what it means to be free, and you truly have no idea what it means to be right.
the fact that i have shit "karma" on here should tell you enough about what kind of people really visit this site most these days. i work at a hosting center where we use linux linux linux, we have immaculate uptime, and we have a LARGE customer base, so SCREW YOU. you cant take it away from us and you cant make us use your CrapOS for Retards. your fucking spyware and your fucked up contracts with hardware manufacturers can go to hell.
and as for the rest of you who think im being a jerk, kiss my ass before i replace you with a shell script...
You are about to give someone a piece of your mind, something which you can ill afford...
Actually, it's a nice way for the attorneys to suck all of the money out of the situation. Threaten to sue: get paid. File lawsuit: get paid. Go to trial: get paid. Apparently for attorneys, the motivations for all of these things are different than the interests of the stockholders of the publicly held company in question. I considered investing in NOVL, since they had the smarts to buy out Ximian and SuSE, but not after this legal crap. I mean, they're positioning themselves to be the desktop Linux company, but then wasting time with these lawsuits? Blah!
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
The ability to view the internal coding on a document (which can be used to copy formatting from one part of a document to another as well) is an extremely useful feature of Word Perfect that I find interesting that Microsoft Word has never had available.
But Microsoft Word does have some uses.
One time I generated a book I had in Word Pefect format to RTF so I could see how it would render in Word and the formatting was slightly different (it printed the headers with a horizontal line below them), and I liked how Word had changed it, but I could not figure out how it had done it. However, but duplicating the format in Word Perfect was a trivial operation.
So both word processors do have capabilities, I have just found that I can usually figure out how to do what I want in Word Perfect easier than in Word. The fact also that Word Perfect never supported auto-execute macros makes it much safer than Word.
The true issue is whether the word processor does what you want to do in a way that enhances your ability. Using a word processor should be easier than using a manual typewriter or paper and pen. As far as enhancing my ability to do what I want in an easier form than other methods, I have found that Word Perfect does this for me and Microsoft Word does not.
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
Hehe, you said "girly" ...
So does that mean that it was a mercy kill-- err, assisted suicide?
To all the people in this thread that are not familiar with WordPerfect past version 5.1/6.0, I have a few points to make:
b -documents (chapter 12&3 and 4,5&6 in different documents, but continuing page/graph/etc. numbering),
- I am in no way affiliated to WP or Corel.
- I did just buy WP 12 yesterday.
- For a good comparison between Word and WordPerfect you can visit: http://www.wpvsword.com
- In the Netherlands there is a version for education/non-profit at 39.95 euro, http://www.schoolbox.nl/sb_wp_office_12.html(no support), I have the impression the student and teacher edition is the cheapest at 89 dollar elsewhere (but does include support and with 20 dollar rebate).
- Despite that I got Word 2004 bundled with my laptop I find WP so much supperior that I bought it.
- My dad using WP 6.0 for DOS on his old 486 can still open documents I saved in the latest versions.
- I think WP lost because in the MS bundle Word+Excel+PowerPoint+Windows is a lot more usability with only a Word being inferior, but Excel, PowerPoint and Windows superior to the competing products Quatro Pro, Presentations and NovellDOS.
MS trying to kill WP didn't help, but the main problem is that MS will ship the complete bundle, like on my laptop, hiding it's cost and making WP "more expensive" no matter what the price is. Only free software can try compete with MS because of their monopoly, but users still need to download it as an extra hurdle. OEM's just can't ship with Firefox, WP, OO.org, etc.
- Some specific reasons I use WP:
Good export to HTML and PDF,
vastly superior equation editor (LateX like, now called the old style editor, because there is a MS like one too),
more advanced DTP options (print as book, folding scheme's), CONSISTENT PREDICTABLE behaviour,
reveal codes/underwater screen,
much more advanced numbering/referencing/caption options for equations/graphs/references/lines/paragraphs,
su
much better handling of large complex documents (100 Mb+)
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Funny, all the court documents I've submitted have had some serious formatting going on that Word just does not handle adequately.
-Jenn
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
> I find it surprising that you'd preface a serious point with a cutesy laugh like that.
Hmm yeah, finding something funny and then giving a serious reply to it is a bad thing to do, and impossible to understand indeed.
(if you really want to know what I found funny, read at -1)
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.