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!.

Comments

A lot of their complaints appear to be about IE

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Novell finally getting justice after many years

[zap_branigan]

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.

Re:Business strategy of the FUTURE :)

[HiThere]

I think you have a short time horizon. WordPerfect was once the dominant word processing program. Actually, for a long time it was the dominant WP program (measuring "long time" in software turnover times. And it was sufficiently good that it survived until at least quite recently. (Perhaps lawyers no longer insist on WordPerfect, but if not that's a relatively recent phenomenon.)

Calling it a phoney product is a gross unfairness. A couple of versions of it were pretty bad, and their Mac version was never stable (or rather, I never used a version on the Mac that was stable), but that's a very different comment.

Re:Word Perfect for Windows was horrible

[Malfourmed]

But that doesn't make MS's anticompetitive behavior any less illegal: "Well, I murdered him, but he had terminal cancer, so it's not as bad."

Maybe not for criminal prosecution. But if the victim only had six months to live, in a civil suit it would probably affect damages based on future earnings.