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Novell's WordPerfect Antitrust Suit Ends In Mistrial

Posted by timothy on from the lots-of-lawyers-love-wordperfect dept.

According to a Bloomberg News article carried by Business Week, "Jurors said today they were unable to reach a unanimous verdict in Novell Inc.’s antitrust trial against Microsoft Corp. over the WordPerfect computer program. A mistrial was declared by the judge presiding over the case in federal court in Salt Lake City ... Novell sought as much as $1.3 billion in damages over allegations that Microsoft, while developing the Windows 95 operating system in 1994, blocked an element of the software to thwart Novell’s WordPerfect and Quattro Pro programs."

31 of 98 comments (clear)

  1. In the jury room... by jd · · Score: 5, Funny

    Clippy: I see you are trying to reach a verdict.

    --
    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  2. Little late... by RobinEggs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Excellent, we got a non-verdict almost 18 years after the events subject to the trial, during which time Microsoft, Apple, and most of the other serial abusers of anti-trust and/or patent law have only maintained or even increased their presence in the market.

    I'm satisfied with our justice system. Everything looks totally cool. Everyone else happy?

    1. Re:Little late... by yog · · Score: 2, Interesting

      And yet, competitors like OpenOffice have been stealing market share from MS Office. By some accounts, OOo now holds over 20% of desktops. Then there's the internet apps like Google Documents, which are steadily increasing in user numbers. Microsoft's response to Google Apps, "Office 365", is a subscription-based product that is not even available without paying a fee. Undoubtedly it's getting some attention in corporate circles, where they like to pay for such things, but no one else cares.

      Apple's steadily becoming more common on the desktop, and they make very highly rated laptops, tablets, and phones. Yet, they're not a monopoly in any of these markets, and Android is overtaking the iPhone.

      I really don't see how Microsoft is more of a monopoly today than in the '90s. It's gradually becoming irrelevant, in fact. People are switching to handheld devices running mainly iOS or Android. In a few years, the average college student may not be using either Windows or MacOS, but instead they will be mainly familiar with these phone/tablet systems. Microsoft is a tiny player in this market so far.

      Basically this Wordperfect lawsuit is a bit dated and irrelevant today. I'm surprised it wasn't thrown out long ago.

      --
      it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
    2. Re:Little late... by Lisias · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Basically this Wordperfect lawsuit is a bit dated and irrelevant today. I'm surprised it wasn't thrown out long ago.

      Dated, yes. Irrelevant, not.

      The message, if the USA Legal System manages to delivery it, will be : "We will catch you, no matter how much time it takes."

      --
      Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
    3. Re:Little late... by CohibaVancouver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      People are switching to handheld devices running mainly iOS or Android. In a few years, the average college student may not be using either Windows or MacOS, but instead they will be mainly familiar with these phone/tablet systems.

      Do you actually work in the real world? I work in software product management - I create complex documents, flowcharts and work on spreadsheets. I collaborate on UI wireframes. My colleagues in accounting run sophisticated apps. I have friends who are lawyers, others who are structural engineers... Many of us work across two 22" monitors...

      How exactly do any of us do this work on tablets or phones? Microsoft OWNS those environments, hands down - From the desktops, to the servers...

      The real world isn't twitter updates from your iDevice.

    4. Re:Little late... by Goaway · · Score: 2

      You have some funny ideas about what the average college student does.

    5. Re:Little late... by MightyMartian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      This is rather like saying "He violated a contract a decade ago, but because the wronged party found other business, pursuit of the initial violation is pointless."

      Just because events have moved long past this period, so far as I'm concerned, if Microsoft deliberately used its monopoly to damage a competitor, it should be made to pay for it.

      --
      The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
    6. Re:Little late... by jd · · Score: 2

      Depends on the university. Where I went, people ran their own 386BSD (and Linux, once it existed) installs, running 16-player games of Netrek or XTank over the campus network using X11R4 on large (for the time) monitors, or were playing DOSish games like Wing Commander using the LAPC1 for sound. Not cheap setups and not something phones or tablets could replicate today by any stretch.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    7. Re:Little late... by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If Microsoft can get lawsuits to age out of the court cache, just by paying for enough delays, it becomes immune to prosecution by anyone. Anyone at all. For anything. The same would go for any other corporation.

      That kind of precedent is very relevant.

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    8. Re:Little late... by Rich0 · · Score: 2

      It is if you were a 50 year old employee of WP holding a ton of stock and you subsequently died without leaving any heirs behind.

      Instead of having a few 10s of millions of dollars to play with in early retirement you instead get nothing until after you're dead. No doubt somebody will donate some money to the Windows-for-schools charity in your name instead.

      Justice delayed is justice denied.

      Look at it another way - if the court merely hands down a $1B verdict here, every CEO across the country will get the message loud and clear - do what MS did! Think about it, you get a boost in market share today and get to charge monopoly prices for a decade, at some risk that 17 years from now you might have to give back $1B. Well, you won't be CEO in 17 years for starters, and even if you are $1B in 17 years is worth $200M today at an interest rate of 10% (typical NPV rate to use). I'm sure MS's actions made them a LOT more than $200M.

  3. jury vote.exe has stopped working by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    and it defaults to mistrial.

    1. Re:jury vote.exe has stopped working by grcumb · · Score: 4, Funny

      [A]bort [R]etrial [F]ail

      --
      Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
  4. Re:Why was this a jury trial? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The 7th amendment says "In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."

    One of the parties asked for a jury trail.

  5. I just read TFA by MoronGames · · Score: 5, Insightful

    and it sounds like one guy held up the whole thing. It was an 11-1 vote AGAINST Microsoft. Sounds like we spotted a fanboy!

    --
    hey!
    1. Re:I just read TFA by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 5, Interesting

      and it sounds like one guy held up the whole thing. It was an 11-1 vote AGAINST Microsoft. Sounds like we spotted a fanboy!

      Or someone who's about to mysteriously come into a lot of money.

    2. Re:I just read TFA by phantomfive · · Score: 2, Informative

      Either that, or he was just the type of person who wanted to disagree with everybody in the room.

      In my (admittedly limited) experience, those kinds of people are the first to fold, the least-likely to stick to their opinion. At first they are upset, outraged at something, but jury deliberation can last a long time. They have no firm principles, so they just want to get out, and are happy to change their opinion if they can go home sooner.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:I just read TFA by ulricr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I am baffled by this. Removing shell namespace extension during beta is absolutely not an obstacle to a third party shipping a word processor or a data base. The standard Open File dialog was just fine and everyone else used it - and still use it. There is no equivalent on any other OS. It's totally irrelevant to why WordPerfect lost the market and they have proof that the database was late anyway and would not have shipped until the year after. I cannot understand what the other 11 juries saw there that was a predatory move, they probably just don't understand all of this tech stuff, it is quite complex to a non programmer, isn't it.

    4. Re:I just read TFA by ediron2 · · Score: 2

      Normally, I'd agree with you. In a room of a dozen nerds, that'd be the fanboi. But in a room with 12 generic citizens, that standout could be the one nerd in the room.

      In other words, maybe the first 11 jurors are like half the nitwits, er *committee* hearing SOPA in congress today -- zzzzzz-zzzzzzz 'bunch of tubes' zzzzzz-zzzzz 'intarwebz are for porn' zzzzz-zzzzz 'if the glove doesn't fit' zzzz-zzzzz. Meanwhile, one of our fellow slashdotters got jury duty and *understood* things, and came to a completely contradictory conclusion.

      I'm not saying Microsoft deserved to win -- I personally doubt it based on it being MS in 1994 -- and I've paid almost no attention to the trial. I'm just a bit more clear on juries 'cuz of a locally-high-profile case I served as a juror for. Reviewing the news stories after that experience quickly taught me that there's a LOT going on in a long trial that gets filtered both ways: the world gets a news story that skips key details, and the jury occasionally gets sequestered from the courtroom when some pretty damn interesting info is disclosed (missing them entirely) or even gets instructions to not consider certain details in their deliberation.

    5. Re:I just read TFA by Gr8Apes · · Score: 4, Insightful

      you have absolutely no idea what MS did.

      However, to MS's defense, WordPerfect never really go the GUI until MS was long out of the gate. However, MS used an entire series of underhanded tricks at the time to improve their products by using secret unpublished APIs that no one else knew about.

      Should they lose this case? Yes. Should they be punished? Yes? Is 1.3B too much? NO!

      Tying products together the way MS did, and utilizing proprietary data on what essentially was, at the time, a near monopolistic eco-system should be punished. Personally 1.3B might be too low. Perhaps increasing it by an order of magnitude or 2 just for the delays I'm sure MS put in would put a stop to it. Or, better yet, grant the 1.3B and then increase it by 10% for each year MS delayed judgement,

      Gee - their purse might get hurt? It's quite possible that all of it was ill gotten gains and therefore subject to forfeiture.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
  6. Re:The MS is on the other foot by Arker · · Score: 2

    WordPerfect was by far the best word processing program at the time. WordPerfect for windows sucked, yes, because MS made sure of that, as you would realise very quickly if you would peruse the Novel exhibits in this case. I remember at the time we kept using the DOS version - even running it under Windows was far preferable to rescuing with Word.

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  7. Re:The MS is on the other foot by robbak · · Score: 2

    Yes, Lotus Word Pro was great. Lotus 123 was everything that its history suggests it should be. Anyone else notice that Microsoft's Haaa-mazin' "Ribbon" is just Lotus' info-box, from the mid 90's, pinned to the top of the screen, where it takes up room the user needs for other things?

    --
    Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
  8. the people who clean your toilets by decora · · Score: 2

    cook your food, sell you your clothes, and work in the factories that make those monitors, are all using phones, not fancy computers.

    and they out number you 99:1.

    1. Re:the people who clean your toilets by ulricr · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Factory workers with 80$ data plans and smartphones? The majority of people have older pcs, a subset of those have iPods that they fill from music on the pc. But they are not browsing the web on a smartphone with an 80$ data plans. Or buying 700$ ipads. The entry point for pcs is much lower and that where most people in the world are.

    2. Re:the people who clean your toilets by corbettw · · Score: 4, Funny

      I dare anyone to read that post and not read it in Tyler Durden's voice.

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  9. Re:I totally remember this! by symbolset · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Believe it or not WordPerfect's problems with printing persisted at least until the last time I had to deal with it, which was WordPerfect Office X4 in XP about two years ago. I did get it to work, but frankly it was high IT voodoo - not the sort of thing in the range of your average geek. It takes a pretty committed customer to even ask for such a thing. Funny story: it had worked fine for over a year, but then a Windows Update came along that broke printing.

    Either the WordPerfect programming team can make an awesome word processor capable of some really brilliant things - but are yet unable to figure out how printing works, or that Windows team really holds a grudge and continues to reverse engineer WP to break printing and other things. Up to the time I was dealing with the problem I would have gone with the latter. Now, not so much.

    WordPerfect was bought by Corel, and in 2010 Corel was bought by "Vector Capital" - an investment group well shielded from discovery of who is actually behind it. If I were to venture an opinion about this, many here would be fitting me for a tinfoil hat. Let's just say my estimation of the chances of a commitment to renovation of WordPerfect to serve the obvious demand for the product and create a resurgence of it is effectively nil. WordPerfect is in my opinion really and truly dead.

    I honestly believe that if WordPerfect were fixed and released it would generate a lot of sales and give a good return on investment. The people who like it really do like it. But I also believe that ain't gonna happen.

    We saw this happen with OpenOffice too. It couldn't fall into worse hands than Oracle. But OpenOffice was open source, so forking was possible and there's hope LibreOffice will be one of the office software contenders in the future. WordPerfect doesn't have that open source feature. It can be killed, and I believe it has been.

    --
    Help stamp out iliturcy.
  10. Unanimous, since when? by mysidia · · Score: 2

    When Microsoft's on trial, a guilty verdict has to be unanmous?

    Normally in a Civil trial unanimity is not required.

  11. Re:The MS is on the other foot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I remember being at the Microsoft Professional Developer’s conference (PDC) in 1993 in. I sat behind a row of Word Perfect programming managers. They slept late, came in mid-morning, seemed to think it a great joke that they had been sent out of town on a junket for Windows, which was *never* going to take off. They laughed, passed notes, and dozed, paying little attention as they knew no one would ever want windows for real work. They were looking forward to Disneyland on Thursday night, though.

    And so it went for a week of introductions to the MFC.

    Two years later, WordPerfect for windows did not seem to be actually written for windows, and wordperfecomplained they had been tricked. To an observer, though, it looked as if they never tired, and then tried to shift blame later.

  12. Re:Why was this a jury trial? by hedwards · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I spent a month on a jury dealing with a multimillion dollar squabble between a developer and a contractor. Personally, if it had been up to me, I would have taken the money from both of them and awarded it to somebody else completely, but that's not how trials worked.

    By the end I thoroughly hated all parties involved.

  13. My recollection by Jeff1946 · · Score: 2

    LIke most folks in the MSDOS world we used word perfect. When we went to Windows 3.1, obviously before 95, we tried various WYSIWYG word processors. Word worked ok, AMIPRO was fine (and my favorite) and WP for windows was just awful. Word had the advantage of being developed for the MAC which gave MS a significant headstart. I would assume the same for excel. The seamless tie-in of word, excel and powerpoint made if difficult for anyone else to compete. The better product won.

    As an aside I believe word perfect for dos cost several hundred dollars and lotus 123 was $495. Now this buys you the office suite.

  14. Re:Why was this a jury trial? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes it is - it's just the lawyers are the 'somebody else' you get to choose from.

  15. Re:I totally remember this! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    The original versions of WordPerfect for Windows (WPfW) had their own print engine that did not use the Windows code. The reason for this (if I remember correctly, it was a long time ago), was the DOS versoins of WP had support for a huge number of printers, mostly created by WordPerfect Corp. itself. When Windows was released the printer support was less complete than WP had, and less consistent. As a result WPfW was written to support the print driver technology of WP to ensure that when it shipped WPfW supported the same range of printers that WP did. The end result was confusion, as printers needed a Windows driver for other apps and a WPfW driver, with possibly different capabilities and definitely different dialogue boxes.

    IIRC WPfW 6 (possibly 5.2) would not even launch without crashing if it did not have a printer driver installed.