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Novell's 2004 Case Against Microsoft Moves Forward
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Novell's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for destroying the market for WordPerfect and QuattroPro can now move forward. The Supreme Court denied certiorari to Microsoft's appeal of an appeals court ruling, which is the fancy legal way of saying they ignored Microsoft's appeal and let the previous ruling stand. Novell's complaint is an interesting read, because some of this sounds quite familiar, given how Microsoft is now forcing the standardization of OOXML. Statements like, 'As Microsoft knew, a truly standard file format that was open to all ISVs would have enhanced competition in the market for word processing applications, because such a standard allows the exchange of text files between different word processing applications used by different customers,' and 'Microsoft made other inferior features de facto industry standards,' sound a lot more recent."
I was working in tech support at a building engineering company in 1997 - lots of big contracts, lots of specification documents, lots of complex calculation sheets - and I was there during the migration from WordPerfect 6.1 & Quattro Pro 6.0 to Microsoft Office 97.
We migrated because our clients started putting clauses in their contracts that all documents and calculation sheets had to be supplied electronically as Microsoft Office documents. There was absolutely no other justification for the migration. Our customers basically forced us to buy Office 97 or they were going to take their business elsewhere. I have no idea why they did this, but I'm guessing Microsoft's 'corporate awareness' strategies must have had something to do with it...
MS Office was more expensive, and required more powerful (i.e. expensive) PCs. It was technically inferior - users would waste hours tracking down formatting bugs in Word that would have succumbed to WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature in a few seconds; Excel didn't support some fairly obvious features (e.g. copy/paste of '3D' blocks of cells across multiple worksheets) that our Quattro users used daily. We had invested heavily in development of macros and templates for WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, most of which ended up being scrapped because there was no way to migrate them.
You have no idea how frustrating it was explaining to engineers - technically literate, intelligent, capable users - that they were no longer allowed to use the tools they'd spend time familiarising themselves with because Microsoft had somehow persuaded our customers to insist that we used an inferior product.
Sure, ten years later, MS Office has overtaken them, and any company trying to compete with Microsoft in the desktop office market have their work cut out for them to say the least - but I honestly believe that Office 95 and 97 killed WordPerfect, and I don't believe they did it by being cheaper, faster or more powerful.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.
As I pointed out in another thread, Microsoft did use predatory pricing to make Word the market leader. However, WordPerfect also had a number of other problems.
This was, in fact, a failing of WordPerfect, because Microsoft made sure you could import them the other way around.
The question is, how long did it take the WordPerfect Corporation* and/or Novell to add this to WordPerfect?
As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect. When they did make a GUI version, they ran into the problem where "WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself used (e.g. Alt-F4 became Exit Program as opposed to WordPerfect's Block Text)." -- Wikipedia, WordPerfect
As far as I can tell from Wikipedia's Microsoft Office Word article, early versions of Word used menus rather than direct keyboard shortcuts, meaning that they had a much easier time moving to a GUI. Although, Microsoft did later steal a number of keyboard shortcuts from Apple.
*They sold WordPerfect to Novell.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I've known people who learned the program by having Reveal Codes on at all times so that they could see the effects of what they were doing and learn how the program worked.
... all from the command-line.
;-)
There were legions of middle-aged secretaries who did the very same day in and day out. The rest of their time, when they weren't yakking on the phone or doing their nails, they managed a directory structure to store their work, formatted floppies, filled in time sheets, printed out mailing labels, and generally maintained their systems
Those were the days.
This makes a lot of sense to me now.
I seem to recall that you could just put in all 1's for the cd-key for the '97 products in order to install them.
I think also counting up from 1 and then back down worked as well.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
I wish them luck,but so far MSFT lately has been their own worst enemy.First Vista(slow and painful) then Office 2K7(confusing and half my shortcuts don't work) and finally getting ready to kill XP(are they REALLY thinking Home Basic on a Wal Mart special is anything but torture?).Maybe this will give someone a chance to come up with a great competitor to Office.OO.o is great on newer machines,but I've found on older office equipment Office 2K just runs better.But as always my 02c,YMMV.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
By the time OEMs were bundling Works with Windows, the game was already over. Prior to that time WordPerfect was the leading Word Processor so Word's file formats had nothing to do with it.
WordPerfect was designed from the ground up to be a non-GUI application. The fact that the product presented you with a blank sheet uncluttered by menus (until very late versions) was a bragging point. It was a very efficient interface for those who spent hours day after day using it. In other words it was great for the secretarial business model (that's why it's still effective for law offices). Unfortunately for WordPerfect, this model was in decline. The new market was for people who didn't use a word processor all day and just wanted to get up to speed quickly.