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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.'"
http://groklaw.net/ ; tends to give better in depth coverage with fewer misunderstandings than most other observers of this lawsuit.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Remember WordPerfect? Hell, I'm still using it. I still have an old Toshiba laptop that runs FreeDos and WordPerfect v5.1
Now, get off my lawn you whippersnappers while me and Bill Gates reminisce about the old days
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
"into thinking he would include WordPerfect in the new Windows system" This is WRONG! Novell thought Windows would include some (4) APIs about "name space extensions".
Bill Gates is spending his time and money these days looking for a cure for malaria and other diseases. Taking time away from that to testify in this case = more dead babies. Novell is killing babies.
Is "reminisce" a euphemism for punch in the face?
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.
Namespace extensions are things that let you mess with Windows Explorer and add your own contextual menus and folder layout. How could that sink a word processor? From the user's point of view, are they really not going to buy the word processor because they can't initiate feature X from explorer? I don't even know of any word processor that even has a feature like that, and it's been 15 years since Windows 95 came out.
I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch.
"The company said Gates duped it into thinking he would include its WordPerfect writing program in the new Windows system then backed out because he feared it was too good."
The whole story seems to be about the namespace extensions thing. So where is Novell claiming that MS agreed to bundle WordPerfect with Windows?
I'm curious as to why this is not a contract dispute? I can only assume it is because no contract existed. If they had a contract with Microsoft that stated what the interface was supposed to be then they would be in violation of contract. If there was no contract and MS was just building an OS and told them the interface would be and then decided not to include it or change it there is no case.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
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
Nothing like having a defunct company bring a lawsuit 10 years after the fact, never settle, and force a trial over 15 years later. Not because Novell wasn't cool or anything, but they did manage to lose every single market advantage they had year over year until they died. Must have been some other company's fault.
Very happy to see this judge refuse to throw this one out and make sure we all get to read about him in the press every day.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
I have been a fan of WordPerfect for many years. I liked how it was ported to many platforms (eg. Amiga). I liked the reveal codes and macros. Some of the keystrokes were a bit obscure, but you got used to them.
But the features of the software were its downfall when it came to a Windows version. Their keyboard shortcuts directly conflicted with that used by Windows, and their massive library of printer drivers were superceded by the Windows drivers. But the biggest problem was the delay in getting a Windows 3.1 version out, and how buggy it was. They can't blame missing features in Windows 95 for that. They went 3 or 4 years before they finally came out with a non-sucky version (WPWin 5.1 to 6.0a). Even the DOS version of 6.0 was buggy - I seem to recall that they had to release a version 5.2 AFTER 6.0 was out.
When they finally did come out with a Win95 version, it would not run on Windows NT. With such a history of poor releases, it doesn't seem to unreasonable to believe that any problems that they had were of their own making.
No.. all programs and web sites do this.
It's called a hex editor.
Now, that may be too complicated for 90% of the techies, but it's not true for the rest of us, and you're slowing us down with the simpleton demands for ASCII-editable interfaces.
I duno how much Microsoft really had to do with it, but it seemed like WordPerfect really screwed themselves with poor quality software and service.
The original release of WordPerfect 7 ONLY ran on Windows 95 (Not at all on under NT), was late to to release, and was not very stable. They later produced an update of WP 7 that was more stable and ran on NT 3.51/4.0 but the only way to get that was to order a new CD. No downloadable update patches for you!
WP 7 for Windows 3.1 was just a rebadged version of the 16-bit WP 6.1.
Then they pulled the same trick with WordPerfect 8. Initially buggy and updates required obtaining a new CD.
To this day there is still an option to turn off the "enhanced" open/save dialog because it is buggy and crashes under odd environments - especially under Wine.
It also didn't help that at the time it was switching ownership left and right. WordPerfect corp? Novel? Corel? Good way to destroy confidence in a product.
One of the three members of the trio who ran WordPerfect corporation, Pete Petersen, wrote a detailed book about the WordPerfect saga called Almost Perfect. Go read it now, it's a fascinating tale of a once-great company so busy shooting itself in the foot that it hasn't noticed that it's going down the tubes. WordPerfect Corp was doing such a good job of committing suicide that it really didn't need any help from Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.
"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."
Out of the jabillion things that made 95 crash, he just happened to focus on the one thing that was not in-house?
Not that Novell is looking any better.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Wordperfect? Windows 95? What decade are we talking about here? Not only have the horses left the barn, they have established a healthy feral population.
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.
I agree with you that Reveal Codes is a extremely helpful feature that is or should be standard on almost all current WordProcessing software. As someone who supports the 90% and 10% of WordPerfect Reveal Codes users, I can safely assume that this feature was not born out of innovation but necessity. I've been "fortunate" to support users using WordPerfect since WP8 and it is a notoriously buggy program that has trouble handling WP codes present in documents from older versions hence the birth of reveal codes. At best Reveal Codes is a great feature to find a bad code present in page 2 that crashes a document whenever you scroll past page 9 but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a "hack" created by the programmers that made it into production as a feature.
Well, I guess if you want to pick a beef you might as well go for it. One more question, am I the only person who never had Windows 95 blow up on them? I mean, going to 98 was a heck of a lot smoother, but I never had any problems with '95.
by Anonymous Coward: I, for one, welcome the shift from car analogies to pizza analogies. um.. overlords?
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.
I suspect the majority of us working in deploying word processing environments at the time would tell you: WordPerfect was the better word processor; Word had better, prettier Windows integration. The integration, along with bundled "Works" versions, pushed the market to Word.
I was a huge WordPerfect DOS fan it was the best wordprocessor and interface was most intuitive I've ever seen. Then they tried to make a Mac version SUCKED horriblily and if I remember they killed the product and restarted and killed again. Then they tried to do a Windows version and it was so-so at best and it died a slow death. Their problem wasn't MS it was they never successfully make the transition from a DOS text to GUI platform.
Maybe they should sue Apple too for their problems.
Yes yes but you couldn't play need for speed 2 or duke nukem + linux GUIs were primitive to put it nicely and the install was the equivalent of a college sophomore level IT course.
Yes it did, I can attest to that.
Remember, X on Linux was not the same X on other Unixes, it was XFree86.
Bugs were being fixed from the original code line, X386 (X11-R5)
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
After all they built windows to crash on purpose for DR DOS
Show Codes is the reason WordPerfect sucked. It was easy to accidentally delete an invisible end tag, and then the entire formatting of your document would be fucked. So you were pretty much forced to reveal the codes and tediously edit around them, which is suckwork for nerds.
I'm perfectly capable of marking-up HTML, but who wants to deal with that shit while you're writing.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
"That part is true, but it only affected some computers (anecdotally, about half). It appears to be at root a bug in the timer chip on the motherboard, which in turn tickled a bug in Win9x. Hardware that lacked the bug would NOT crash at the 49 day mark". by Reziac
Is this billg talking, cause he's also able to selectively distort the historical record when it suits him too.
" Symptoms: After 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows-based computer may stop responding (hang).
Cause: There is a problem with the timing algorithm in the Vtdapi.vxd file.
Resolution: For Windows 95, For Windows 98" link
The windows client uses the API call GetTickCount() to get the current uptime. The value returned by that function can't be larger than 49.7 because elapsed time is stored as a DWORD value.
"Air Traffic radio control system crashes every 49.7 days"