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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."
If their software was so superior, why did WordPerfect die?
They, just like Microsoft, were more interested in making money then they ever were in providing consumer choice, or making it easier for us to transfer information. There was nothing stopping them keeping their product active.
I used to use WordPerfect. It was great. Then Microsoft outmaneuvered them, and they lost. Boohoo, get over it. Care to try and convince me that they wouldn't have done exactly the same thing to microsoft, given half a chance?
Don't bother, I wouldn't believe you anyway.
People were shifting between companies all the time back then. Microsoft weren't some alien group, they were people with exactly the same goals and level of experience as the competition. They just had the superior business model for the day. Back then things were nasty, but they were nasty all round, it's just fashionable to only remember microsofts bad deeds.
I think the behemoth is definitely in the right on this one, as always. They are always doing the right thing. Like running this multi-zillion dollar advertising campaign for Apple Macs, which is codenamed Vista or something like that.
It's really ingenious. Want to advertise something cool? Make a competing product that really sucks, and then people will buy the cool product. By leveraging innovative technologies, content providers streamline compelling enterprise solutions.