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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."
Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.
Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
"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."
Business model has nothing to do with it. Talking key decision makers within the Federal government to standardize on Windows and Office has everything to do with it. Nobody I worked with at the time was gung-ho to switch to Windows or Office, we did so because our customers (the Feds) mandated that all future submissions had to be in Word or Excel format.
Microsoft as much as anything is a US Government created monopoly, and the Feds (using taxpayer money) funded a whole new round of spending on PCs and related software for which the existing infrastructure was ill prepared (and still hasn't recovered; witness continuing loss of e-mail and other documents due to conflicting or non-existent internal document standards).
Hopefully wide adoption of something like ODF (and not OOXML) by Europe and other countries will cause US decision makers to finally get a clue (I'm only cautiously optimistic though as they are a fairly clueless bunch). I remain concerned that some people mistakenly see support of Microsoft as the patriotic thing to do when in fact it has hastened the dumbing down of most of the people exposed to it. I know, you won't believe me anyway.
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.
"...they lost. Boohoo, get over it."
It would appear that the fat lady hasn't yet sung.
It wasn't a fair contest, so they didn't lose in the way a tennis player loses. They lost in the way a mugging victim loses. What you refer to as a business model is what I call organized crime.
Fashion has nothing to do with why we remember microsoft's bad deeds. With so many M$ fanboys running around, it's quite unfashionable. We remember them because as professionals and as consumers, *we* are still being punished by what they have done and *they* have yet to pay for it.
If their software was so superior, why did WordPerfect die?
Like I responded to an earlier poster,
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=490544&cid=22778924
Microsoft effectively killed it with the Windows Monopoly.
They, just like Microsoft, were more interested in making money then they ever were in providing consumer choice,
Your argument is wrong on so many levels...
Word Perfect made its product available on the MacIntosh, Amiga, Apple ][gs, Atari ST, DOS, Windows, Solaris, and VAX systems. What platforms did Microsoft write Office for? What Windows fees did Microsoft charge computer makers for not bundling Microsoft Office/Works versus the ones who did?
Did Microsoft offer matching Marketing funds (paid by you for your non choice of an Operating System when purchasing a PC) to computer makers who bundled PFS Windows Works with their Windows based computers instead of computer makers who chose to bundle Office/Works? No, they didn't.
Is Microsoft evil? No. Are they greedy? Yes. Is there any room for competition within the Microsoft Windows sphere of influence? That remains to be seen. Am I running Linux? Yes. Am I biased? Yes. I haven't had to pay for upgrades or reinstall any Windows machines in my house since switching to Ubuntu. Zero downtime.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
More of the story about why the competitors lost market share:
1) Microsoft apparently was deliberately allowing piracy of Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products. I know this because I called the Microsoft legal department, accused them of allowing piracy, and forced them to stop some of the local pirate outlets. In response, Microsoft brought one court case. But the other pirates continued. Later Microsoft made it impossible to contact their legal department.
Legitimate suppliers of alternative products could not compete because computer customers were being offered pirated copies of Microsoft Office for $50 when bought with a computer -- or less.
2) The people who owned most of the WordPerfect stock did not WANT to compete. You can read the book about this written by the COO of WordPerfect, Almost Perfect, available online.
My opinion is that Microsoft allowed piracy, and that was the biggest contributing factor toward the failure of competitors.
How many Microsoft software engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb ?
Non, Microsoft defines darkness at the new standard.