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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."
Where's the fucking money Lebowski?
If you're not confused, you're not paying attention
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'
F7...reveal codes, a godsend lost....
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()
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.
True words! I can't tell you how many times I have fixed the screwed up formatting of a Word document by saving the stupid thing as ASCII text and starting the whole formatting process over. Even knowing how to find hidden section breaks etc. doesn't always help. Word formatting is just evil.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
TeX: Writing with reveal codes always on...
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...
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.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
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.
This was true in Word for DOS. WinWord started making it a lot more complicated than that. Capsule summary: a document is now a file system.
No. In word, formatting is tied to the paragraph mark (PM) at the end of the paragraph. Delete the PM for paragraph #1 and all the text, etc. in that paragraph will inherit the formatting from paragraph #2. Hint 1: click that backward "P" on the format toolbar to reveal where the PMs are (I still use Office 2000 so have no clue how this is done in more recent versions of Office). Hint 2: copy the PM of the paragraph whose format you like and then past it at the end of the paragraph that got messed up -- problem solved.
Disclaimer: I still use Word 5.0 for DOS as my main word processor.
I come here for the love
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.