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

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?"

[esocid]

Hi, I'm 1990, I'd like to sue 2011 please.

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?"

[fermat1313]

WordPerfect lost its dominant position for one reason - their own miscalculation. In the early 90s, WordPerfect didn't think that the Windows 3.x craze would catch on, and they didn't put their development efforts fully into the Windows product. It wasn't until 1991 that they announced WordPerfect for Windows, and it was a disaster, just a GUI front end on top of their DOS engine. In late 1992, they finally came out with a decent Windows version. By then much of the world had moved on to Word. They were slow to support OLE, slow to integrate with PlanPerfect, and later with Quattro Pro, slow to see the power of an integrated office suite, slow slow slow! In addition, MS PowerPoint was orders of magnitude better than anything out there, and it worked with Word and Excel.

Sometimes in business, management makes a severe miscalculation. Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton blew it in 1989/1990. Maybe WordPerfect was better, but it was just too damn late.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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

[hairyfeet]

You want to know why MS Office won? Piracy! The older versions of Office were beyond easy to pirate, hell I even remember one of them would take all 1s or all 0s as the serial number!

It is the same reason why cheaper alternatives to PhotoShop never have a chance. The kids snatch PS, they learn PS, and this helps Adobe in the long run to sell to businesses. I can't find the link ATM but back in the day old Bill himself said something along the lines of "If they are gonna pirate I want them to pirate us instead of our competitor, as we can always find a way later to turn them into a paying customer".

Hell I would argue that is why they've never tried making a "hack proof" Windows activation and they never seem to go out and shut down those WGA kill programs. It is because they know there is no way in hell Linux will ever gain a foothold on the desktop as long as it is easy to pirate Windows. Only problem they have at MSFT is someone forgot to fill Ballmer in as those $50 Win 7 HP licenses was turning pirates legit left and right, so instead of killing it they should have kept it and turned the pirates into paying customers.

So I'd love to see how they are gonna argue this one in court, as repeated studies show PS is easy to snatch and that is why PS ends up being used in business, because everybody already knows how to run it. Are they gonna argue that it isn't fair for MSFT not to try to make their programs uncopyable? Or that legit Office users should have to jump through flaming activation hoops so WP would be the easier product to snatch? Because I don't see how the black market helping a product can be simply sued away.

Re:What?

[mrclisdue]

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

Slashdot title is a bit misleading

[Walking The Walk]

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.

Re:Slashdot title is a bit misleading

[esocid]

It's an appeal to their 2004 case, in which a lower court ruled in Microsoft's favor. MS argued that Novell's allegations were subject to the deal with Caldera from '96. Calder acquired the rights to DR-DOS from that deal, then sued Microsoft, settled in 2000.

It was handed a $280m settlement from Microsoft, of which Novell got £35.5m.

Re:Slashdot title is a bit misleading

[demonbug]

It was handed a $280m settlement from Microsoft, of which Novell got £35.5m.

So you're saying that Caldera got to keep ¥16.8 billion?

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?

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

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.

Re:What?

[Chris Mattern]

TeX: Writing with reveal codes always on...

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.

Re:What?

[justthinkit]

lot of mark-up and formatting information, and then most of the text

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.

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.

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've used WordPerfect

Disclaimer: I still use Word 5.0 for DOS as my main word processor.

I Was There

[dugn]

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.