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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.