Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Takes the Stand In WordPerfect Trial
Hugh Pickens writes "Remember WorldPerfect? Bill Gates took the witness stand to defend his company against a $1 billion antitrust lawsuit that claims Microsoft duped Novell into thinking he would include WordPerfect in the new Windows system, then backed out because he feared it was too good. Gates testified Monday that Microsoft was racing to put out Windows 95 when he dropped technical features that would no longer support the rival's word processor. He said that in making the decision about the code, he was concerned not about Novell but about one element of the program that could have caused computers to crash. That code, technically known as 'name space extensions,' had to do with the display of folders and files. Novell attorney Jeff Johnson concedes that Microsoft was under no legal obligation to provide advance access to Windows 95 so Novell could prepare a compatible version but contends that Microsoft enticed Novell to work on a version, only to withdraw support months before Windows 95 hit the market. 'We got stabbed in the back.'"
This is what Microsoft was throughout the late '80s and entire '90s. People today look at Gates and see a great man donating billions to help starving people in Africa. Yes, he is that, but remember how he made those billions. He made them by crushing the rest of the PC software industry using heavy-handed, often blatantly illegal means, from his perch as CEO of a monopoly.
Gates is the modern day John D Rockefeller or Cornelius Vanderbilt.
There is a list of defunct companies as long as the dictionary who thought they could trust Microsoft. Even the ones who profit in the short-term eventually discover that their product is now a free feature of the next version of $MicrosoftProductName$.
Show codes.
When you ran into trouble with the way your document was displaying, you could hit show codes and edit the paired tags (a lot like HTML).
No program should ever hide your data so that you cannot directly edit it when the "interpretive" parts of the program guess incorrectly about what you want.
The first and foremost abuse of this is web-based comment fields with little mini-GUIs to help you format your text. When the system "guesses" the wrong bullet point, or line spacing, etc. you can fix the problem in three seconds with a show codes option.
Sadly, many programs and web sites do not do this. They think it's too complicated for their users. While this may be true of the 90%, it's not true for the rest, and they're slowing us down with the simpleton interface.
Grrr.
Futurist Traditionalism
Steve Jobs didn't seem to do that :p If he did, nobody found out about it. I find it hard to believe that nobody would find out if he did though.
which is totally what she said
My first Linux was not for coding or server or e-penis, it was to keep the fucking music playing while Windows did one of its routine crashes. The crashes I had learned to live with but the music constantly interrupting because of it I had not.
Then I learned of course that on Linux you could keep a browser open. Just open. You know, open. Where you left it and come back to it and not found the system had crashes and lost all your search history.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Right, because the success of Word Perfect entirely hinged on being able to do something funky in file open dialog instead of using the standard OpenFile dialog, with the customization support everyone uses!! Adobe, Core, Autodesk, no one else had this problem. That wasn't at all a fundamental function of a word processor AND when you develop on a beta operating system you CAN expect things to change before it ships.
If Apple had enticed Google into developing Android for them, then intentionally pulled the plug in order to cause serious harm and distract and delay them from developing Android in different ways, but claimed to be innocent of that, then yes that Jobs statement would be meaningful.
son, reality is a bitch.
but back in the days of 95... ... 95 didnt crash every day, it just got slower. also, it still ran on DOS. .....linux in that time might have run rock solid, but the X server crashed every day. so no, linux was not heaven.
And, I'm just as serious with my answer:
WHAT THE FUCK DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHETHER THIS IS ANY DIFFERENT THAN WHAT APPLE DOES?!?!?!?!
FFS, people, the world doesn't revolve around Microsoft and Apple. They are both pretty much the same - bullies, who are impossible to play with, unless you are willing to accept them changing the rules every couple of days.
Let me ask your question right back at you. Ted Bundy was a terrible person. But, how was he any different than Charles Manson? Does that help to understand that your question is really really close to being moronic? (And, the answer to my rephrased question would be, "No difference, they are both low life predators!)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Agreed, the article blows on tech details. Between the Gates-bashing and the Linux/Win95 wars in this thread, there's been a severe lack of technical discussion. Then again, it's Slashdot.
In a nutshell, it seems that name space extensions (NSE) allowed you to leverage using the Windows File Explorer to represent things that weren't really files and directories at all. Details here. Perhaps Novell was layering a document management system (or networked document management system) on top of NSE's.
If WP was managing the documents for something like a law or medical office where it's fairly easy to drown in folders and files, this would be a great selling feature and yeah, NSE's might be a good shortcut to that representation. But you'd think that when MS withdrew the feature a clever engineer could just emulate the Explorer's representation of objects that they'd worked so hard to build already to feed to Explorer's NSE. It wouldn't be the first time someone's re-invented that wheel, for sure. Hell, if I were that engineer, it might be something I'd already have around for testing. When you play in someone else's sandbox, you'd better be prepared for them to take their best toys and go home; at least there's always sticks and rocks to play with.
Any way you slice it having something like that sink your word processing software is possible, I guess, but only if you're position was already tenuous.
Get off my lawn.
In the last month before release I change every API call that you were using. Your program suddenly looses access to keyboard, screen, file system. You say "Hey, I already shipped the product! What's are the API changes?" -- "No changes, I removed it completely. There is an alternative API that MY text editor is using, if you want to know what it is, no problem, I will provide a spec in 6 months or so".
The point is, if you rely on my API, I can pull a rug from under your feet at any moment. It's a short leash you are on.
Adobe, Core, Autodesk, no one else had this problem.
Maybe it is because MS did not target them with a replacement of their own. The fact that MS did not manage to kill ALL non-MS software does not make them any less guilty.