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.'"

Comments

Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article.

[hairyfeet]

Not to mention Novell seems to have an awfully short memory on how long it took MS Office to gain traction. Remember folks we are talking OFFICE software, offices tend to be pretty damned conservative and don't just change software willy nilly. Hell look at how many corps are still running XP even though its two versions behind!

Well I was working corp and SMB at that time and I can tell you MS Office really didn't start to gain any great traction until Office 97 and didn't cement their place until Office 2K/XP in 200/01 respectively. The reason WP bombed was because like MANY software companies at the time they tried to put out not a Windows program but a DOS program with an updated GUI to look like a Windows program. Remember that there was a BIG difference here folks, DOS is a 16 bit single tasking OS whereas Windows 95 was a 16/32 bit hybrid OS with multitasking and Win98 was a 32bit OS with some legacy 16 bit and a DOS bootloader. I can tell you those companies that tried to put out DOS programs with only a GUI makeover ended up with misbehaving piles of shit because they expected to be the only thing running and thus could stomp all over the memory and that just didn't work with Windows. if you did that you got a HELL of a lot of crashes and hangs!

So they had a solid TWO YEARS which is like a decade in software years to make a new version and IIRC they didn't put out a truly solid Windows version until almost 2001, which by then nobody gave a shit. I had customers that tried to hang onto WP but it simply was too buggy in a Windows environment compared to DOS so when office 97 came along and everyone talked about how it didn't crap itself and die like WP they reluctantly switched. hell last I heard the law firms are STILL on WP, that bunch is so conservative that it'll probably be another decade before anybody starts using MS Office. I know that when i quit doing corp in 05 the law offices were hanging onto WP and I saw no signs it was going anywhere.

TL:DR? Novell had PLENTY of time to come out with a new product but instead hung onto the old code for too long and by the time they saw the train it ran them over.

Re:AP claim (repeated in summary) is confusing

[rickb928]

There were other reasons that WP was dependent on running with Win95:

- WP4x slammed the market because they wrote print drivers for virtually every printer, and back then printers were wacko. No two were alike. So having print drivers for your fancy NEC daisy wheel printer was crucial. Even Word for DOS lagged here. In fact, WP support was largely printer support, and they did very well.

- Then Windows 3x did printing for you, albeit at the lowest common denominator, and Wp's key feature was diminished. They did, of course, write their won print subsystem so stuff like superscripts and kerning actually worked right, and fonts were properly supported.

- Windows 95 made vast improvements in printing, and of course HP started making laser printers, and WP's advantages in supporting all these dot-matrix and wheel printers started to not matter at all. WP's biggest advantage, WYSIWYG printing, was being incorporated into Windows. Advantage MS.

- Word for Windows finally got printing right around that time, and WP was being crushed by both loss of their printing advantage and the killing off of several key features - the file dialogs that made a secretary's life tolerable as documents proliferated, the inherent networking advantage of those dialogs, in a LAN environment where Novell ruled and VINES was the big corporation/government solution, and naming was critical to managing those many many documents.

MS didn't just drop those APIs, they purposefully showed them in pre-release examples of the OS, and failed to notify any of the developers in advance that they would not ship (except for a very few, under NDAs, like Adobe and Autodesk, but that story is not entirely substantiated to this day). Novell didn't get any notice, and their client (and WP, not just WordPerfect but Office and the mail stuff) all were left holding their cannoli on release.

Not just embarassing, but in the shop I was in then, we had plans to deploy 95 in a month after release, and that became 6 months as the NetWare client was fixed. Management started to scream that we should ditch NetWare and go to NTAS, but we survived that.

Oh, and after 7 years, the shop did finally kill NetWare and go to Server 2003. And the server reboots went from single-digits per 7 years to single-digts per week. But at least it's compatible.

Re:Very important stuff

[rickb928]

Your opinion is common, and IMHO, somewhat misguided.

- Justice delayed is justice denied. It's taken this long to get past MS's delaying tactics. You seem to think this is Novell's fault.

- Novell will be able to show that it was materially harmed by deliberate acts by MS, intended to harm their products, and done without disclosure. Had MS just sayd out front that Win 95 would not support WP, and you needed to buy Word, well, that would be a different legal case, probably one for restraint of trade. And behold, that's the case now, save that Novell is claiming MS did it surreptitiously.

- And Novell lost most of their networking advantages the same way, MS rendering their products incompatible on purpose, while promoting their competitive solutions.

No need for an analogy here. Such acts are illegal. Making better products isn't. Mostly. But this wasn't a patent case.