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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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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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 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.
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
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.