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Microsoft Wins WordPerfect Antitrust Battle With Novell

Posted by Soulskill on from the raise-your-hand-if-you-even-remember-wordperfect dept.

New submitter Psychotic_Wrath writes "After a long, drawn-out legal battle and a hung jury, a federal judge has dismissed Novell's antitrust case against Microsoft. The case involved allegations from Novell that Microsoft removed code from its Windows 95 operating system which created the need for further development to WordPerfect. Novell says this delayed the release of their product, giving Microsoft Word an unfair advantage. Groklaw has a detailed write-up on the decision."

2 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Re:So they removed APIs? by jd2112 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Who cares? Windows nor any other OS.. (remember the whole cocoa/carbon debacle with OSX?) gives any guarantee that APIs will never be deprecated.

    Remember the saying "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run"?

    --
    Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  2. Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis by KingMotley · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm not sure why you think it's strange. You do realize the whole case basically revolves around the "File/Open" dialog, and that WordPerfect didn't want to use that standard one, and because Microsoft (for whatever reason) decided to not give out an API to do some things with it, they decided to write their own instead of using the default one. One middle manager's decision (that wasn't overruled by someone higher up) caused the Office Suite to be delayed by 4-6 months. Although, there is argument whether Quattro would have been ready to go at that time.

    Novell's whole argument is that they were delayed in release because they CHOSE to write their own custom File/Open dialog instead of using the default one, and that lead to their demise because of timing? According to them, IF they had chosen to use the default one they would have been able to deliver on schedule. This is just bad management.

    Now, the reasons behind why Microsoft stopped that particular API is in question, and their motives may not have been altruistic, but it was a frigging BETA. They explicitly state that they can/may change/remove/add APIs at any stage of the beta. Sorry, but this is a silly lawsuit and should have been thrown out before it even made it this far.