The problem is that the very first version of WordPerfect for Windows was a mess on Windows 3.0/3.1. So what does that have to do with changes to the OS? It's not as if WordPerfect had been written for Windows 1.0 or Windows 386 and MS made secret changes for Windows 3.0.
It was game over long before Windows 95 or even before Novell bought the WordPerfect.
"But that doesn't make MS's anticompetitive behavior any less illegal"
Well, if it's simple legality involved then its the goverment's responsiblity to sort out, not Novell's. The only relevant question to this case is whether MS performed illegal acts that directly resulted in a 40% drop in WordPerfect's market share.
Reading Novell's filing it sounds like the integration of browsing in Windows was one of the main illegal acts. What this has to do with WordPefect, I don't know.
There were some APIs that were not revealed by MS, but it didn't stop many other companies from creating good and successful products.
If WordPerfect Corporation (the company that owned WordPerfect at the time they started to lose their market share) really believed that they couldn't produce a non-buggy Windows version of WordPerfect due to insufficient info from MS, they shouldn't have released one.
All of this has little to do with OS/2 since the tipping point occured during Windows 3.0/3.1 timeframe not Windows NT/Windows 95 timeframe.
I note that Novell's filing mentioned the MS integration of a browser in it's OS. I wasn't aware that WordPerfect had web browsing capabilities in the early 90's.
I guess you work for a very small company. Larger companies understand that it is more productive and cheaper to try to improve the employees you have then to fire someone at the first sign of trouble and then spend a month or two replacing them will someone that is not guaranteed to be any better.
Generally, employers are not particularly intersted in your personal computing projects, they want to see evidence on your Resume that somebody paid you to work on the technology they are interested in.
This guy was not the original leaker. When discussing the SCO case on Slashdot, some posters claimed that once a trade secret is revealed it can no longer be enforced. This case proves otherwise.
Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on the validity of SCO's claims, only the incorrect belief that revealed trade secrets become public domain.
I'd imagine that people with financial problems have already been bribed.
Seriously, though, if you have any skeletons in your closet, the probability of being blackmailed will go up exponetially if you reveal it to the government.
A few years ago one of Clinton's aids got in trouble with the government for understating how much hush money he was paying to his ex-mistress. Lessons learned from this:
1. The goverment can't keep a secret 2. It's OK to cheat on your wife 3. It's OK to pay hush money 4. It's not OK to lie to the government about your personal life.
I think if you spend 90% of your time working with a single application, memorizing command-line and function key combinations make sense (of course, for many DOS applications there was no choice).
I think one of the reasons that Unix fans cling so strongly to familiar tools is that they don't want to learn a lot of new keystrokes and keywords despite the fact that they celebrate the command-line. It's the command line one already knows that is powerful.
I haven't used WordPerfect for many years, perhaps it's better now. I didn't like the DOS versions (long before I used MS Word, by the way) and the early Windows version was buggy, so I'm not likely to try it now. That ship has already sailed.
MS didn't release API info for GUIs? Petzold published his first Windows programming book in 1988. There were other sources as well.
Ironically, Corel Draw (who later briefly owned WordPerfect), had released its first version around 1987 which was much more GUI-intensive than Wordperfect for Windows.
Funny how hundreds of companies didn't have these problems when programming for Windows. Wordperfect for Windows crashed a lot on its very first version. How was MS able to look at which APIs Wordperfect for Windows used before it was released?
You're going to have to give me a lot more specific info and timelines before I'd buy into your claim.
Your memory of that time is different than mine. I don't think OEM's bundled MS Office much in those days.
For one thing, WordPerfect was the market leader not MS Word. Also spreadsheets were not commonly used for non-accounting purposes in those days.
Most OEM's were competing on price and basic features like how much RAM and Disk space they had. The last thing they would want to do was jack up the price by hundreds of dollars with an expensive software suite that probably wouldn't fit on the hard disk of most of their systems.
"Novell is "reinventing" themselves as a Linux company."
So basically, they're selling commodity technology created elsewhere. This reinvented company sounds more like a retailing company than a technology one. Sounds pretty dead to me.
Companies like Novell aren't so much witnesses as they are plaintiffs. If it weren't for all the lobbying by US competitors of MS, there wouldn't be any EU action (or US Justice Department action either).
The fact that Novell appears to be poised to sue MS yet again proves the old wisdom that if you pay off an extortionist, they'll just try it again.
"There is a lot of accumulated wisdom built into some of the older codebases, especially the BSD TCP/IP stack."
I guess you mean there's a lot of accumulated wisdom ADDED to the older codebases in more RECENT versions. If it were designed from the ground up to be secure, there wouldn't be any accumulation required.
It seems to me that security is much better understood today than it was at the time the BSD TCP/IP stack was originally designed. It might be possible to design an entirely new TCP/IP implementation that is inherently more secure.
As for the cost of development, it depends on the organization. Start-ups can have very low overhead. In addition, we're talking here about a non-real-time system with the core requirements already known. I'd say the effort is below the average for most embedded systems.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, nobody had a browser but they were adopted very quickly. While it's true that Wikis use a browser, they didn't have to be designed that way, its just more convenient.
In any case, the other alternative I mentioned was using plain text which I believe is possible in a browser since I'm doing it right now.
Which of my failed startups are you referring to? (Actually, they weren't mine, I just worked there).
I don't know when the greatgrandparent startup started up, so it's hard to tell if it will be successful or not. What I do know is that staying on course is necessary but not sufficient for a startup to transition to a viable business. It's easy to get distracted by your tools, office furniture, etc.
I find the history of all this interesting. HTML has tags that are a bit like the tags shown in the old WordPerfect when you invoked "Reveal Codes". Not very user friendly but justified under the theory that everything has to be edited with a simple text editor instead of a special WYSIWYG editor.
Then Wiki's come along and apparently HTML is now too complicated. So do they replace it with simple text or a WYSIWYG editor? Of course not! There's a brand new set of stuff to learn.
With Geeks there must always be a price users have to pay to do something new even if simpler methods could be implemented easily.
"The advantage of a Wiki is that the users can guide the content, rather than some marketing droid making up questions he wished users asked."
So the person asking the question gets to answer it too? How helpful. Or is the idea that a user can add a question to the Wiki? If it's the latter, doesn't that violate the entire purpose of a FAQ?
At least the fact that you have to pay for Lotus Notes has discouraged the creation of these Borg Collectives. If it's free we may all get assimilated.
It seemed to me if the question was just about eating market share, it was a stupid one since it is obvious that Linux has some desktop share. Even BeOS could make that claim.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the very first version of WordPerfect for Windows was a mess on Windows 3.0/3.1. So what does that have to do with changes to the OS? It's not as if WordPerfect had been written for Windows 1.0 or Windows 386 and MS made secret changes for Windows 3.0.
It was game over long before Windows 95 or even before Novell bought the WordPerfect.
"But that doesn't make MS's anticompetitive behavior any less illegal"
Well, if it's simple legality involved then its the goverment's responsiblity to sort out, not Novell's. The only relevant question to this case is whether MS performed illegal acts that directly resulted in a 40% drop in WordPerfect's market share.
Reading Novell's filing it sounds like the integration of browsing in Windows was one of the main illegal acts. What this has to do with WordPefect, I don't know.
There were some APIs that were not revealed by MS, but it didn't stop many other companies from creating good and successful products.
If WordPerfect Corporation (the company that owned WordPerfect at the time they started to lose their market share) really believed that they couldn't produce a non-buggy Windows version of WordPerfect due to insufficient info from MS, they shouldn't have released one.
All of this has little to do with OS/2 since the tipping point occured during Windows 3.0/3.1 timeframe not Windows NT/Windows 95 timeframe.
I note that Novell's filing mentioned the MS integration of a browser in it's OS. I wasn't aware that WordPerfect had web browsing capabilities in the early 90's.
I guess you work for a very small company. Larger companies understand that it is more productive and cheaper to try to improve the employees you have then to fire someone at the first sign of trouble and then spend a month or two replacing them will someone that is not guaranteed to be any better.
Generally, employers are not particularly intersted in your personal computing projects, they want to see evidence on your Resume that somebody paid you to work on the technology they are interested in.
This guy was not the original leaker. When discussing the SCO case on Slashdot, some posters claimed that once a trade secret is revealed it can no longer be enforced. This case proves otherwise.
Note that I'm not expressing an opinion on the validity of SCO's claims, only the incorrect belief that revealed trade secrets become public domain.
I'd imagine that people with financial problems have already been bribed.
Seriously, though, if you have any skeletons in your closet, the probability of being blackmailed will go up exponetially if you reveal it to the government.
A few years ago one of Clinton's aids got in trouble with the government for understating how much hush money he was paying to his ex-mistress. Lessons learned from this:
1. The goverment can't keep a secret
2. It's OK to cheat on your wife
3. It's OK to pay hush money
4. It's not OK to lie to the government about your personal life.
I think if you spend 90% of your time working with a single application, memorizing command-line and function key combinations make sense (of course, for many DOS applications there was no choice).
I think one of the reasons that Unix fans cling so strongly to familiar tools is that they don't want to learn a lot of new keystrokes and keywords despite the fact that they celebrate the command-line. It's the command line one already knows that is powerful.
I haven't used WordPerfect for many years, perhaps it's better now. I didn't like the DOS versions (long before I used MS Word, by the way) and the early Windows version was buggy, so I'm not likely to try it now. That ship has already sailed.
MS Word won the competition with Wordperfect long before Novell had anything to do it. It was over even before Corel owned it.
Wordperfect for Windows didn't work properly under Windows 3.0 and 3.1, Windows 95 wasn't required.
MS didn't release API info for GUIs? Petzold published his first Windows programming book in 1988. There were other sources as well.
Ironically, Corel Draw (who later briefly owned WordPerfect), had released its first version around 1987 which was much more GUI-intensive than Wordperfect for Windows.
Funny how hundreds of companies didn't have these problems when programming for Windows. Wordperfect for Windows crashed a lot on its very first version. How was MS able to look at which APIs Wordperfect for Windows used before it was released?
You're going to have to give me a lot more specific info and timelines before I'd buy into your claim.
Your memory of that time is different than mine. I don't think OEM's bundled MS Office much in those days.
For one thing, WordPerfect was the market leader not MS Word. Also spreadsheets were not commonly used for non-accounting purposes in those days.
Most OEM's were competing on price and basic features like how much RAM and Disk space they had. The last thing they would want to do was jack up the price by hundreds of dollars with an expensive software suite that probably wouldn't fit on the hard disk of most of their systems.
"Novell is "reinventing" themselves as a Linux company."
So basically, they're selling commodity technology created elsewhere. This reinvented company sounds more like a retailing company than a technology one. Sounds pretty dead to me.
Too bad every failing business can't get 20 cents on the dollar from their more successful competitors.
Novell made a lot of money on networking PCs, but they were really a one hit wonder.
Companies like Novell aren't so much witnesses as they are plaintiffs. If it weren't for all the lobbying by US competitors of MS, there wouldn't be any EU action (or US Justice Department action either).
The fact that Novell appears to be poised to sue MS yet again proves the old wisdom that if you pay off an extortionist, they'll just try it again.
"There is a lot of accumulated wisdom built into some of the older codebases, especially the BSD TCP/IP stack."
I guess you mean there's a lot of accumulated wisdom ADDED to the older codebases in more RECENT versions. If it were designed from the ground up to be secure, there wouldn't be any accumulation required.
It seems to me that security is much better understood today than it was at the time the BSD TCP/IP stack was originally designed. It might be possible to design an entirely new TCP/IP implementation that is inherently more secure.
As for the cost of development, it depends on the organization. Start-ups can have very low overhead. In addition, we're talking here about a non-real-time system with the core requirements already known. I'd say the effort is below the average for most embedded systems.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, nobody had a browser but they were adopted very quickly. While it's true that Wikis use a browser, they didn't have to be designed that way, its just more convenient.
In any case, the other alternative I mentioned was using plain text which I believe is possible in a browser since I'm doing it right now.
Which of my failed startups are you referring to? (Actually, they weren't mine, I just worked there).
I don't know when the greatgrandparent startup started up, so it's hard to tell if it will be successful or not. What I do know is that staying on course is necessary but not sufficient for a startup to transition to a viable business. It's easy to get distracted by your tools, office furniture, etc.
I find the history of all this interesting. HTML has tags that are a bit like the tags shown in the old WordPerfect when you invoked "Reveal Codes". Not very user friendly but justified under the theory that everything has to be edited with a simple text editor instead of a special WYSIWYG editor.
Then Wiki's come along and apparently HTML is now too complicated. So do they replace it with simple text or a WYSIWYG editor? Of course not! There's a brand new set of stuff to learn.
With Geeks there must always be a price users have to pay to do something new even if simpler methods could be implemented easily.
"I can only speak for myself, but I work at a startup, and we use a Wiki everyday."
Q: So why did your startup fail?
A: Well, we spent a lot of time playing with our Wiki instead of getting our first product out the door.
"The advantage of a Wiki is that the users can guide the content, rather than some marketing droid making up questions he wished users asked."
So the person asking the question gets to answer it too? How helpful. Or is the idea that a user can add a question to the Wiki? If it's the latter, doesn't that violate the entire purpose of a FAQ?
At least the fact that you have to pay for Lotus Notes has discouraged the creation of these Borg Collectives. If it's free we may all get assimilated.
It seemed to me if the question was just about eating market share, it was a stupid one since it is obvious that Linux has some desktop share. Even BeOS could make that claim.