Novell's 2004 Case Against Microsoft Moves Forward 197
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Novell's antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft for destroying the market for WordPerfect and QuattroPro can now move forward. The Supreme Court denied certiorari to Microsoft's appeal of an appeals court ruling, which is the fancy legal way of saying they ignored Microsoft's appeal and let the previous ruling stand. Novell's complaint is an interesting read, because some of this sounds quite familiar, given how Microsoft is now forcing the standardization of OOXML. Statements like, 'As Microsoft knew, a truly standard file format that was open to all ISVs would have enhanced competition in the market for word processing applications, because such a standard allows the exchange of text files between different word processing applications used by different customers,' and 'Microsoft made other inferior features de facto industry standards,' sound a lot more recent."
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Novell had perfectly good Apps what crushed the certainly was not a superior product.
And here we go again
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:5, Interesting)
We migrated because our clients started putting clauses in their contracts that all documents and calculation sheets had to be supplied electronically as Microsoft Office documents. There was absolutely no other justification for the migration. Our customers basically forced us to buy Office 97 or they were going to take their business elsewhere. I have no idea why they did this, but I'm guessing Microsoft's 'corporate awareness' strategies must have had something to do with it...
MS Office was more expensive, and required more powerful (i.e. expensive) PCs. It was technically inferior - users would waste hours tracking down formatting bugs in Word that would have succumbed to WordPerfect's "Reveal Codes" feature in a few seconds; Excel didn't support some fairly obvious features (e.g. copy/paste of '3D' blocks of cells across multiple worksheets) that our Quattro users used daily. We had invested heavily in development of macros and templates for WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, most of which ended up being scrapped because there was no way to migrate them.
You have no idea how frustrating it was explaining to engineers - technically literate, intelligent, capable users - that they were no longer allowed to use the tools they'd spend time familiarising themselves with because Microsoft had somehow persuaded our customers to insist that we used an inferior product.
Sure, ten years later, MS Office has overtaken them, and any company trying to compete with Microsoft in the desktop office market have their work cut out for them to say the least - but I honestly believe that Office 95 and 97 killed WordPerfect, and I don't believe they did it by being cheaper, faster or more powerful.
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:1, Interesting)
But if you read the email as a whole, you'll realize that they're talking about making the IShellBrowser api public -- not exactly a useful api to writing a browser. In fact, if you read it as a whole you'll see that they're talking about pulling resources that would be used to make the interface public and put those resources on making Office better.
Sysadmins (Score:-1, Interesting)
I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo [gentoo.org] or custom LFS [linuxfromscratch.org] distribution, Debian [debian.org] was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware [slackware.org] felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC [dell.co.uk] with an OEM install.
At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.
Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.
These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.
I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix [postfix.org], MySQL [mysql.org], and Plone [plone.org], and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.
I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.
I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:4, Interesting)
As I pointed out in another thread, Microsoft did use predatory pricing to make Word the market leader. However, WordPerfect also had a number of other problems.
This was, in fact, a failing of WordPerfect, because Microsoft made sure you could import them the other way around.
The question is, how long did it take the WordPerfect Corporation* and/or Novell to add this to WordPerfect?
As I recall, Novell was also slow about producing a GUI version of WordPerfect. When they did make a GUI version, they ran into the problem where "WordPerfect's function-key-centered user interface did not adapt well to the new paradigm of mouse and pull-down menus, especially with many of WordPerfect's standard key combinations pre-empted by incompatible keyboard shortcuts that Windows itself used (e.g. Alt-F4 became Exit Program as opposed to WordPerfect's Block Text)." -- Wikipedia, WordPerfect [wikipedia.org]
As far as I can tell from Wikipedia's Microsoft Office Word [wikipedia.org] article, early versions of Word used menus rather than direct keyboard shortcuts, meaning that they had a much easier time moving to a GUI. Although, Microsoft did later steal a number of keyboard shortcuts from Apple.
*They sold WordPerfect to Novell.
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, the bundled version of Works would allow you to install the Upgrade version of Office 95 or 97 instead of the full version.
The first hit is always free....
Re:I think that is a pretty poor analogy (Score:4, Interesting)
There were legions of middle-aged secretaries who did the very same day in and day out. The rest of their time, when they weren't yakking on the phone or doing their nails, they managed a directory structure to store their work, formatted floppies, filled in time sheets, printed out mailing labels, and generally maintained their systems
Those were the days.
Re:1) Microsoft allowed piracy. 2) WP owners quit. (Score:5, Interesting)
I seem to recall that you could just put in all 1's for the cd-key for the '97 products in order to install them.
I think also counting up from 1 and then back down worked as well.
Re:I think that is a pretty poor analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
But it doesn't really matter because businesses got rid of most of their secretaries after GUI word processing became popular.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No wonder they modded you 'funny' ... (Score:4, Interesting)
WordPerfect was designed from the ground up to be a non-GUI application. The fact that the product presented you with a blank sheet uncluttered by menus (until very late versions) was a bragging point. It was a very efficient interface for those who spent hours day after day using it. In other words it was great for the secretarial business model (that's why it's still effective for law offices). Unfortunately for WordPerfect, this model was in decline. The new market was for people who didn't use a word processor all day and just wanted to get up to speed quickly.
Re:Sorry to say... (Score:2, Interesting)
I respectfully disagree that they didn't understand what GUI was capable of.
In this [youtube.com] video of NeXTstep 3, Jobs does a short demo of WordPerfect at about 6:15. The comments of the video date it around 1993. However, according to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] there was only 1 version of WordPerfect for NeXT; that was released in 1991. Thats 2 years before WP6 for Windows was released.
As an earlier poster had said quoting from the book Almost Perfect, the actual problem was that they didn't get Windows. At the time both IBM and Microsoft was telling everyone that OS/2 was the future, not Windows. They didn't want to waste time making a proper port to a system that was, as Microsoft was telling them, destined to be dead. The success of the Windows 3 series surprised everyone, including Microsoft. By the time the WordPerfect developers figured that out, their name was dirt to Windows users.
Re:I think that is a pretty poor analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
Non-technical users in my company thought it was bizarre that WP advanced "right or maybe left" when they hit the right-arrow key. They didn't care to hear explanations about hidden markup codes, and wanted to have just one WYSIWYG frame and get on with their jobs.
As bad as MS Word for Windows was at the time, all of our non-tech users preferred it, as it didn't demand that they understand concepts like markup, and was far more intuitive. WP was summarily dumped after a few difficult months of trying to make it work the way the users wanted.
I loathe Microsoft and their current bad-joke products as much as the next person, but back then WordPerfect for Windows was the worse product, apparently hobbled by a design requirement for backward compatibility with its installed DOS user base. MS Word for DOS was vastly inferior to WP for DOS, but Microsoft therefore had the luxury of forcing their small DOS user base to import into a new format for the Windows version, rather than maintain the old DOS doc format at the expense of usability. That strategy appears to have worked.