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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.
Actually that's part of what they are alleging MicroSoft caused I believe. MS told them that OS/2 was the way to go, not to worry about a Windows implementation, and then hid the APIs needed to make a good Windows implementation at the same time.
But I do agree, the early WPWin was pretty bad, where I worked we stuck with the DOS versions, which fortunately ran quite well under Windows anyway.
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It is a bit of a grey area, but I think the fact that MSs Office and Windows divisions were told to keep some distance from each other a few years back is relevant. Ie, the Office team aren't to be given preferential treatment and knowledge over 3rd parties.
Only big ligs use sigs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I worked for WordPerfect as a Software Tester (Software Quality Engineer) between 1992 and 1994 so I have first-hand knowledge of how slimy Microsoft's competitive tactics were. When I started working at WP, they owned over 90% of the PC Word Processing market. MS set their sights on them and stooped to all kinds of levels to rub them out of the market. As a matter of fact, on the WP campus in Orem, UT, we had an entire building called building S that was dedicated to Security. Rows and rows of black and white TVs connected up to closed circuit cameras planted all over the campus. There were hundreds of them. You see, MS had a habit of hiring corporate spies to sit in the parking lot with binoculars and write down code snippets they saw on white-boards in the developers offices. Dumpster diving, you name it, all sorts of corporate espionage went on. They had more security there than most defense contractors. They had to. Microsoft has always played a dirty game.
The first few versions of WordPerfect for Windows were by default crippled because Microsoft kept the (important) Windows APIs undocumented. Any new features that WordPerfect was working on behind closed doors were somehow stolen and announced in a press release by MS the day before WP had scheduled a press release to announce them. There were half a dozen employees in the marketing department and even development that were found to be on MS payroll and ended up getting fired.
Microsoft is one of the most unethical companies I know of. Their tactics should land them in the corporate malfeasance hall of fame along with the likes of Enron, but instead, they are worshipped as the darling of Wall Street.
As one of many former WordPerfect engineers who was sad to see such a great company get rubbed out of the market, I can tell you first hand that MS Word would be a much better program right now if it had any legitimate competitors.
Windows Server would also be a much better server product if they hadn't used their dominance on the Windows desktop to rub Novell out of the server market as well, although, in that case, Novell hastened their own doom by refusing to acknowledge that IPX was doomed and TCP/IP was the wave of the future.
It's good to see Novell finally doing what they should have done 10 years ago... stick it to those anti-competitive mo-fos.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
"no enforcement technique can control them [Microsoft]"
I disagree; there is an enforcement technique to control them.
On top of paying the money, let them lose copyright/patent over a percentage of their lines of codes/applications equivalent to the market share lost by the other company.
Letting the other company choose what MS copyrights/patents are lost, of course. Otherwise MS would dump sol.exe and clippy. Think of the brain damage a free clippy would cause! (-;
At that rate, ALL windows code should be free source in 10 years... so soon enough we'll get a Linux and a BSD with word, sol.exe, and that tax program you use only once a year that the government refuses to make for linux.
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.
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.
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.
Monopolies are not illegal. using a monopoly to create new monopolies in other areas is. This is what MS was convicted of.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Doesn't that make it a monopoly? That's the percent Windows had at the time it was considered a monopoly.
Yes, but as others have already pointed out, having a monopoly is not in and of itself illegal. It's what you do with that monopoly that matters. WordPerfect was an ethical company. They treated their employees and customers well, and gave FREE technical support to all of their customers. I'll leave it for you to decide who you would rather have as your corporate master.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
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)
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.
Version 6.1(DOS) was a very good version, in my view. Stable (6.0 had some problems but we got a free upgrade and 6.1 fixed them,) keystroke compatibility with 5.1 on toggle with a more GUI mode that was easier for new users, and also for the first time with a WYSIWYG mode which I found helpful when working with charts and graphs. But several people in the office asked me to roll back 5.1 anyway - they already knew how to do everything with it, and it did run faster in less memory - very important running it on the 486s of the day, particularly if you were using Windows to multitask.
It was really still lightyears ahead of MSWord - hell, it's still lightyears ahead of MSWord, yet MSWord took over the market. I don't have a firm opinion yet on to what degree that was due to MicroSoft being better at marketing and to what degree they actually crossed the line into illegality, but from a cursory look at the complaint and the coverage at Groklaw it looks like Novell may have a case.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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 $0 per seat it convinced everyone.
wp sucked, the best at the time for us was ms
ms sucks, the best for us now is open office
jumps with joy!
It makes me sick. It seems to be the industry standard these days that if you have a failing comapny, find someone rich to blame and try to sue them.
If you can't beat them, sue them.
People should take responsibility for their actions. Someone screwed up at Novell and they want to pass the buck. Ethics right out the window.
Jamey Kirby
Frankly, I've never ran either one.
First off, there is not any great amount of M$ 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.
I've only read up to page 30 of the complaint so far but it seems to claim that Microsoft witheld critical information from Novell on the new "Browsing" functionality it was including in Windows during the beta stages of the development of Windows 95.
This seems odd as the "Browsing" features they claim relate to Internet Explorer, which was not included with Windows 95 until OSR2 and did not become a critical part of the system until Windows 98. What information could Novell have needed about Internet Explorer before the release of Windows 95, that would have prevented them from creating fully compliant and integrated software for Windows 95?
"Taligent is still pure vapor. Maybe they'll be the last who jumps up on Openstep... "
I will grant you that Microsoft probably wasn't playing fair with the APIs, and we suspected as much at the time. But that didn't excuse the utter arrogance combined with total lack of performance that was the WordPerfect corporate sales and support team.
Did I mention that we signed an 8000 seat license? Fairly big in those days, no? And we tested/prototyped it for more than a year. We fed hunderds, if not thousands, of detailed bug reports back to WordPerfect. We asked, pleaded, and begged our sales team to get someone, anyone to look at our bug reports and fix just a few of them.
Maybe QA and development were overwhelmed by Microsoft perfidity, I dunno. I do know that company dumped WordPerfect (and Lotus 1-2-3, which performed similarly) for Microsoft Word and Excel as soon as it could. And most of us who had backed the choice of WordPerfect lost our jobs when the Microsoft-lovers took control.
Did I mention that was an 8000 seat license?
sPh
> Word Perfect for Windows was Word Perfect for OS/2
You never tried Word Perfect for Solaris, did you?
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?