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Court Clears Novell To Sue Microsoft Over WordPerfect
An anonymous reader writes "15 years after Novell sold the software to Corel, a court has given Novell the right to sue Microsoft over WordPerfect, which had a 50 percent market share in the early '90s."
i feel young again!
What?
Profit through litigation, now we know why they bought that company.
There's closing the barn door after the animals have left and then there's just.... uhm... I'm at a complete loss as to what a metaphor for this would be.
Wordperfect was relevant once... I even remember using it.
But it isn't now. Live with it. Move on, for chrissake!
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
From TFA:
The issue before the appeals court was whether the Caldera settlement [from the 1996-2000 case] also included the associated office productivity software, WordPerfect and Quattro Pro
The way I read that, it doesn't have to do with how many years ago Novell sold WordPerfect, it has to do with an old court case in which the parties are disputing what the settlement covered.
A recursive sig
Can impart wisdom and truth
Call proc signature()
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/04/27/1845212/Novell-Completes-Sale
First UBL gets killed, then this. I've been so worried all these years that justice would never be served, but my hope has been renewed.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Your ideas are intriguing to me. Tell me more about this so-called 'Word Perfect'....
Novell are technology has-beens that have been in their death throes for over a decade. They're suing because law firms can speculate on percentages. I doubt Novell will even survive to see the end of this.
is the only thing I really miss about WP. I only switched over to OO and then LO with my switch to Linux, but back in the day, I couldn't write without reveal codes.
I used WordPerfect 4.1 through 5.1 from about 1985 to about 1993. I loved it while it was still produced and supported by WordPerfect, Inc. The tech support was excellent.
Then it came out in a Windows version, which wasn't so hot. WP, Inc. sold it, and tech support went into the toilet. I can't recall whether Novell was the one who bought it from WP Inc., but Novell probably screwed up the software and its customer base more than anyone. That's when I dragged myself kicking and screaming to Word.
Novell deserves a lot of the blame for the loss of market share.
The court also certified a class-action suit against Studebaker over frequent automatic transmission failures in the 1953 Studebaker "Commander" model.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
While not related to the case at hand, frankly WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and GroupWise for Windows clients were nearly the worst piles of garbage ever written for the Microsoft OS. Their demise in the marketplace had to do with bad programming and quality control testing. We tried to use these products and had to reject them completely or face a user revolt. MS Office, for all its flaws, was still a better product and everyone knew it.
WP was a wonderful word processor on DOS and I guess DR Dos up to some point, then it got overly complex. It did not transition to Windows gracefully especially when it was forced to dance to the tune of shots nicely aimed when each new Windows patch came out. Ethics was not anyone's strong suit in those days. Hate to be the legal counsel on either side of this one.
Remember when people used to have this thing called a "printer" and spent hours filing away papers?
Seems so antiquated. And it wasn't even that long ago.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I was a Corel shareholder (then having major Linux and Office ambitions) when they were acquired in a shady takeover by company with MS affiliations.
WIKI: "In August 2003, Corel was wholly acquired by Vector Capital, a private equity firm, for $1.05 a share (slightly more than the cash in the company)."!!
I then invested whatever was left in Novell (then having major Linux ambitions, and the Office market manipulation suit against MS) when in March (this year) they were acquired in a shady takeover by company with MS affiliations/cash - Attachmate. (again for slightly more than the cash in the company!!).
WTF!!!
Being based outside USA in *both* cases I only received voting material *after* the crooked managements had already approved the swindles! My other brokers (holding same stock) never sent me any information whatsoever...
This market capitalism seems to work wonders! For the fucking insider swindlers!
When these scheming attachmate characters release what's left of my former Novell investment... any open-source companies looking for long-term investors? I can't wait to be screwed one last time by greedy insiders in cahoots with MS! Or any lawyers interested in...
I loved WP back in the day, when its menus and actions made a lot more sense IMO than Word's. They went to crap when they sold out, and the development team tried copying Word instead of innovating. Usually a desperation move that does not work unless other market forces are at play. Honestly Word 2007 was the first version I could stomach to use. As a side note, a company I was working for bought a site license for about $400 that covered a couple hundred installs, where Word was going to cost that much each seat.
I recall that WordPerfect had a GUI long before MS-Word.
Also, Lotus AmIPro (which I much preferred over both of them) had a GUI first along with many more features and better usability. I wish I had kept some PC magazines from back then, AmiPro for years was winning the Editors Choice Award with MS-Word coming in third.
Hasn't Novell gone the way of the dodo? Are we witnessing the birth of a new SCO?
20 minutes into the future
Good call. Too much time is wasted using it...
Word Perfect's equation editor language kicked much ass as well.
Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was.
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.
That is not how the story is told by someone who was there from the beginning:
In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.
Afterword
What, in your opinion, were the critical marketing mistakes made by WordPerfect from your departure up until the acquisition by Novell?
WPCorp spent themselves to death. The last full year I was there (1991) sales were approximately $600 million and pre-tax profit was $200 million. In 1992, sales fell to about $570 million, but expenses grew to equal sales. 1993 sales were about $700 million (if that number can be believed), but expenses grew to more than $700 million. The employee count from early 1992 to the end of 1993 grew from about 3,300 to 5,500, and the company was bleeding cash.
WPCorp needed better products to compete, and they needed a suite of products. The products didn't get better, and selling a Borland Office (rather than a WordPerfect Office) was silly. By spending away all their cash, the company had no chance of recovering. By not developing better products in a productive and efficient way, the company had no chance of recovering. Given Microsoft's strength, perhaps WordPerfect Corp never would have been able to reclaim their number one position in the word processing market, but they could have survived if they would have kept their expenses in check.
Almost Perfect
In the DOS era, WordPerfect was supporting every platform known to man - and distracted by internal partisan rivalries. The transition to a GUI came particularly hard.
DOS WordPerfect 6 in particular was a truly awesome piece of software. It fit on about 7 floppies but it did everything you would ever need a word processor to do. Its graphics handling was marvelous. Placement of figures and insertion of special characters in particular was much easier than it is in either OpenOffice or Word even today. Ditto for macros and keyboard customization. The Reveal Codes feature saved countless hours of frustration in solving formatting problems. Editing on a green screen in text mode made writing such a pleasure. When they discontinued text mode, I think in Windows WP 7 or 8, no one could believe it. What were they thinking?? I still used WP6 for years even when it became completely incompatible with everything and everybody else. I would just print to postscript, then postscript to PDF. Then for some reason even that stopped working, so I finally gave up.
It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was.
Debatable on the DOS versions. Word for DOS wasn't anything great. Gotta disagree with you on the Windows versions. They were at least comparable and the consensus seemed to be that Word was regarded as the better product by most.
Some of it's features even modern word processors don't have.
A double edged sword if there ever was one... That's not necessarily a bad thing. I remember with little fondness the little cards you had to attach to the function keys so that you could remember the gazillion totally non-intuitive functions that were available. Virtually every keyboard in every office at one time had one of those little things attached to it. Ugh.
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.
"Deserved to win"? They failed to recognize that Windows was the future and came out with an late, buggy and arguably inferior product well after the migration to Word was under way. You can argue that Microsoft used some underhanded tactics but Wordperfect had the dominant position and they unquestionably screwed it up. Word was nothing amazing but some of the main reasons Wordperfect "died" was from self inflicted wounds. They had a dominant market position and failed to recognize where the market was going.
Wordstar sues Wordperfect.
VEdit sues Wordstar.
WP would kick ass TODAY... as would WordPro. Those were excellent products and recent M$Word offerings are even putting ribbons on the UI, for absolute lack of ideas of what to do to stuff more BS into an already bloated beast.
And yet where I work they toast money on "excellent" recent versions of M$ products. What for? Who said computers only work if M$ provides them with thinking?
Users can be idiotic at times for buying M$, but for professional buyers we have to create entirely new Greek prefixes to measure IQ... what comes under yocto?
nt
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
The two founders of WordPerfect, Bruce Bastian and Dr. Alan Ashton were looking to retire and sell off the company. WordPerfect produced GroupWise and WordPerfect. The soon-to-be released versions of WordPerfect 6.1 (Windows) and 6.0 (UNIX) were getting rave reviews. As soon as they were released, they were sure to take MS Word by storm, put the last nail in WordStar's coffin and secure WordPerfect as the de facto word processor on the planet.
At the same time, Novell was having a hard time showing the value of NetWare-connected machines. Companies were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to install NetWare, but weren't seeing the value of 'networked' machines without an application to showcase NetWare-connected PCs.
Novell approached Alan and Bruce with an offer to purchase GroupWise. But Alan and Bruce were unwilling to split the company into two. Novell insisted and pushed. Novell finally agreed to buy the company (WordPerfect + GroupWise) - as a whole - for the negotiated price.
This all happened right before mass production of the new and highly reviewed WordPerfect products was to begin. All that was needed was for the 'Golden Bits' to be delivered to the factories for mass production, duplication, packaging and shipping. The channel was primed and the companies were waiting with bated breath to purchase the new WordPerfect.
But that never happened.
As soon as the company was purchased, Novell ignored WordPerfect (the product) like an ugly stepchild. They wrapped all of their energies and marketing muscle around GroupWise and bundled it with every sale of Novell NetWare. As a result, people were finally able to see the value of 'networked' machines that you allowed employees to collaborate calendars and share intra-office email.
But it was Novell that killed WordPerfect. There is no one else to blame. Novell killed a cash cow that was handed to them for nearly nothing. In the resulting vacuum, Microsoft Word slowly made inroads that eventually established Word as the word processing standard for the majority of companies around the world.
If the facts come out, it'll be clear Novell has no one to blame but themselves. And not just for WordPerfect's demise - but for NetWare as well. They've failed to capitalize on so many opportunities it's a wonder they even lasted as long as they did.
I loved WP for DOS. The most perfect Word Processor ever. Now every 3 years MS keeps changing Word and it sucks.
What killed Corel was the Dot Com crash.
Before the crash, Corel was in talks to merge with software tools maker Borland. But when the crash happened, the merger fell through and Corel ended up on shaky ground (which resulted in the buyout and the end of the Corel Linux work)
An interesting piece of alternative history, in the real world the record has this to say:
"We are pursuing a strategy to keep WordPerfect on the defensive. In effect, this means acting like we are still the "trailer" and explicitly calling them out with aggressive switcher tactics" link
"In an email dated October 3, 199, however, Bill Gates ordered his top executives to retract the documentation of the browsing extensions, but only until Microsoft’s own developers of the Office suite of applications had sufficient time to work with the hidden extensions to build an insurmountable advantage over competitors such as WordPerfect" link
"I have decided that we should not publish these extensions. We should wait until we have a way to do a high level of integration that will be harder for likee of Notes, Wordperfect to achieve, and which will give Office a real advantage" link
"When I read the section beginning at paragraph 92, for example, about Microsoft deliberately making Word incompatible with WordPerfect" link
upon carefull examination, a phrase was found in all three languages:
"Word sucks."
For the hierogliphs, the winddings font was used.
I love and miss WP. Reveal codes was nice. The function keys were nice too. It was back in the day, where people went to a typing class before they dared trying to earn money at a keyboard. So, putting out a template where each one of the 10 function keys had 4 different actions depending upon which shift-alt-ctrl key you were holding down. Well that's just natural and obvious. Once you get your hands on the keyboard, Why you would not want to move them to grab a mouse?!?!?!? Good times, good times.
Technically they did not lie. MS' OS/2 kernel powered WinNT, XP, Vista and Win7.
The kernel power WinNT and its descendant has a completely different lineage then OS/2.
A OS/2 descendant, done in collaboration with IBM, was the initially announced plan. Windows 3.x running on DOS was a stop-gag measure.
Except that Windows 3.x had good success.
Suddenly Microsoft saw they success, said "fuck it!" to their former partner, designed a NT (with a new kernel based on some former VMS technology), which was mainly exposing Windows API, with some compatibility for OS/2 API and Posix added to help captures those customers.
And all the developers who where betting on OS/2 *as told by microsoft themselves* were left sitting.
It was stupid for anyone to ignore the then present market based on what is in the faraway future.
Except when microsoft repeats to everyone under the sun that OS/2 is the way to go and will be an almost-today future, Windows 3.x on DOS is only a stop gag measure, wait for OS/2 2.0 any-second-now, etc. While at the same time developing a secret VMS-powered OS, which will run all their software developed for the alleged stop-gag measure, while being compatible enough with older OS/2 to catch those users. And developing Windows API running competing software, so that when Windows turns out not to have been stop-gag and that Windows NT is unveiled, Microsoft will be the one providing the perfect software, while all the competition has invested resources into developing for what will turn out a dead-end, wainting for a magical Windows on OS/2 which will never ever appear.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Well at least OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice encourages using styles. It's not such a nice separation as TeX. But at least you can then handle the formatting by editing the styles directly.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Also, while I'm not positive on this, I believe WordPerfect introduced the grammar-check before Word.
1991:
Microsoft had introduced a new version of WindWord at COMDEX (their official abbreviation for Word for Windows was WinWord, but I liked to add the extra d), and the new version included some new features we did not have. Among other things, they included a grammar checker and feature called Word Art. I liked to think the features were not very useful, but they did look very nice in a demonstration.
Almost Perfect - Chapter 13
Word Art survives, of course.
Similar capabilities exist in other programs. Apple's iWork, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org have an equivalent feature in more recent versions, and The GIMP's Script-Fu is somewhat similar (although often used for different purposes). OpenOffice.org's version is called Fontwork. WordArt also exist as a drawing option in Google Docs.
WordArt, Word Art Generator
Not only is NT a descendant of OS/2, the fist release of NT, 3.1, was originally developed as OS/2 3.0.
That's only marketing.
Windows NT doesn't share much code with OS/2 2.0 (specially not in the kernel department. The graphic shell isn't that much relevant, and the kernel was written by Ex-VMS guys on a different technolgy).
Windows NT's main API is the windows API (win16 to be precise) (as decided by Microsoft when they decided to go their own route instead of keeping joint development with IBM) with Posix and OS/2 API added as way to catch a few customers from these market.
As such WinNT has a distinct lineage from OS/2. To get back to the main topic of this thread, that means that any vendor hoping to create OS/2 3.0 software and spending resources onto it would be left out in the cold. WinNT did offer some back compatibility with OS/2 API, so users could still use the software they invest into. But most of the future of Microsoft would be Windows 3.x and WinNT (and later Win32 iteration thereof, like Win9x and Windows NT 4), running on Windows API. So the most successful software would be software targeting these APIs. Which is not what was promised in the initial announcement.
Promised by Microsoft : "OS/2 API will be everywhere, start developing OS/2 software now and be part of the future". Competitions follows advice and invests into OS/2 development or waits for newer OS/2 revision to appear and/or stabilize.
Reality thank to Microsoft : Windows API is everywhere, OS/2 only runs on a selected subset of platforms (WinNT 3.x, OS/2), software written for it won't see a huge market (high-end workstations with WinNT, or users who bought the expensive after-market OS/2), software written for Windows API is the way to go (Windows 3x + MSDOS bundled everywhere, WinNT running this software too, Windows 3x can run on top of OS/2 2.x), and only Microsoft happens to have the relevant software ready to ship (like an Office suite), because they told everyone else to do otherwise. The other developers spent time and resource for a platform which turned out to die on the long term.
It was IBM that said "fuck it!" IBM made many mistakes while dealing with Microsoft, allowing MS to license DOS to other vendors was just the first of many to come. Microsoft was not developing that "secret VMS powered OS" until IBM said "fuck it!"
Well, most of the source I've read tend to say other wise : Microsoft decided to keep their stuff because Windows 3.x turned out too successful to let go, and the VMS powered WinNT kernel was started as an internal distinct and competing developing team. But that doesn't matter much for this thread's main topic.
the key points are
- OS/2 turned not to be the way to go, unlike what microsoft announced.
- Software targeting OS/2 API would have had much success (would run NOT on mainstream DOS-based Windows 3.x, would only run on a selected subset of WinNTs, and on machine where the users bought OS/2)
- the Windows NT family doesn't share technically much with OS/2. The kernel is completely different, its main API is different. Support for OS/2 API was bolted-on on some of the first version to help capture more users. Later members of the family don't even support this API.
To get back to your sentence :
Technically they did not lie. MS' OS/2 kernel powered WinNT, XP, Vista and Win7. It was stupid for anyone to ignore the then present market based on what is in the faraway future.
Microsoft's successor to Windows+DOS and to OS/2 1.x powered WinNT3, NT4, 2000, XP, Vista and Win7. But this successor is not OS/2 (that would be the separate development that Windows threw on OS/2 2.x). OS/2 died long time ago.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]