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."

Comments

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

What?

I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?"

[mark-t]

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!

Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?"

[ColdWetDog]

This is closing the barn door after the barn has burnt down. And been rebuilt.

But Justice (and lawyer's fees) will have their day!

Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?"

[neoshroom]

Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was. Some of it's features even modern word processors don't have. For example, it had a MakeItFit feature where it would make what you already wrote fit any amount of pages by making very small adjustments to font size, margins and line spacing to hit the desired page count. You can't imagine how much work that saved me in high school (both from going under and going over the requested length). What modern word processor has that feature?

WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product. It's more like closing the barn door after a competing farmer stole all your cows and torched your barn ten years ago, so you had to sell the farm.

Re:I can't be the only one who's going... "WTF?"

[WhiteDragon]

WordPerfect also blew a big chunk of the revenues from their office suite on tech support. You'd call in, and one of 1000 or so well-trained staff would answer almost instantly and talk you through how to solve your problem.

Ever try calling tech support for Lotus, or Microsoft, or just about anyone else? Endless voicemail maze, eventually you wait on hold for half an hour to reach someone who doesn't speak your language and has never used the product. Much, much cheaper for the company.

Yes, indeed, WordPerfect tech support was best in the industry, hands down.

Re:What?

[mrclisdue]

F7...reveal codes, a godsend lost....

Reveal Codes...

[zanian]

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.

Re:What?

[Chris Mattern]

TeX: Writing with reveal codes always on...

Re:What?

[icebike]

If WP wasn't so pathetic in its editing and document management capabilities in the first place it would never need reveal-codes.

It was a crutch that every user had to learn because as long as that existed, there was precious little incentive for WP to ever fix the bugs that necessitated the crutch. You had typists (yeah, that's what they were called in those days) trying to micromanage the formating of every document, which just as often lead to way worse problems.

Not that Word was ever a whole lot better. But with Word you could always select the offending text and remove all formatting and then clean it up.

About here is where all the WP fanboys jump on me with both feet. Talking down about WP is almost as dangerous as badmouthing OS/2.

Re:What?

[RogerWilco]

The problem with the Word format, is that unlike WordPerfect, it isn't very sane. If you look at a Word document low level, it first has a lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text. Formats like WordPerfect, HTML, etc., have what I consider more sane formatting, in the sense that there will be markers intermingled with the plain text to indicate where styles, bold, italic and such start and end.

I don't understand the low level Word format, but if you look at it, it seems to be mainly geared at making at as hard as possible to understand what's going on.

It's also why in something like WordPerfect, you can delete all the text between a start tag for example bold, and an end tag and the software will remove both, while in Word pieces can remain, and all of a sudden text starts turning bold, or some other style, when you don't expect it.

Disclaimer: I've used WordPerfect up to version X3 (13), basically until I switched to Mac about 4 years ago. I consider it still better than Word in a lot of aspects. I've used a mix of OpenOffice, MS Office and LaTeX on the Mac. WordPerfect, CorelDraw and SmartDraw are the main reasons I still fire up my old Windows computer every now and then.