Bill Gates Takes the Stand In WordPerfect Trial 472
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.'"
Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Informative)
It's worth reading through much more on Groklaw; this article [groklaw.net] explains that they were shell extension namespace APIs which made URL integration possible. It's pretty obvious that if WWW integration is a major new feature relied on throughout your code and Microsoft has promised to implement a large part of it, when they hide those APIs so that partners can't use them it's going to be a big problem.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Agreed, the article blows on tech details. Between the Gates-bashing and the Linux/Win95 wars in this thread, there's been a severe lack of technical discussion. Then again, it's Slashdot.
In a nutshell, it seems that name space extensions (NSE) allowed you to leverage using the Windows File Explorer to represent things that weren't really files and directories at all. Details here [microsoft.com]. Perhaps Novell was layering a document management system (or networked document management system) on top of NSE's.
If WP was managing the documents for something like a law or medical office where it's fairly easy to drown in folders and files, this would be a great selling feature and yeah, NSE's might be a good shortcut to that representation. But you'd think that when MS withdrew the feature a clever engineer could just emulate the Explorer's representation of objects that they'd worked so hard to build already to feed to Explorer's NSE. It wouldn't be the first time someone's re-invented that wheel, for sure. Hell, if I were that engineer, it might be something I'd already have around for testing. When you play in someone else's sandbox, you'd better be prepared for them to take their best toys and go home; at least there's always sticks and rocks to play with.
Any way you slice it having something like that sink your word processing software is possible, I guess, but only if you're position was already tenuous.
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The part I don't understand is why this is being litigated today. Shouldn't this have happened 15 years ago?
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Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
You're comparing Windows 95 to Linux distros of the same era?
Windows 95 was infamous for crashing at least daily, I knew plenty of fairly knowledgeable people who took pride in being able to keep it running for a week. While it was, in theory, capable of multitasking the truth was that very few users would gamble with multitasking under Win9x (except for things like running an IRC client, an MP3 player and a web browser at the same time). Why? Because it crashed fast and hard for seemingly no reason (a single program crashing often brought the whole system down in various fun ways, the common pattern being that a program crashed and you scrambled to save everything you were using in other programs, with alternate filenames of course, just in case the crashing program had corrupted something, within a minute or two the system would bluescreen as you did something like click the Start menu button).
By comparison Linux at the time was rock solid. Yes, both Windows and Linux are more stable than the Linux distros of that time but even Red Hat 4.x and Slackware 3.x were more stable than the average desktop machine is these days.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
Wasn't there a Windows95 bug that would 100% crash the OS after 46 days? And it took years to find this bug because usually the OS would crash much much earlier...
49.7 days. Affected Windows 95 and 98. http://news.cnet.com/Windows-may-crash-after-49.7-days/2100-1040_3-222391.html [cnet.com]
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Interesting)
That part is true, but it only affected some computers (anecdotally, about half). It appears to be at root a bug in the timer chip on the motherboard, which in turn tickled a bug in Win9x. Hardware that lacked the bug would NOT crash at the 49 day mark.
[My old Win98 box evidently lacks this bug, as it has many times run more than 7 weeks at a crack. But it has a server-class motherboard. It is now almost 14 years old and still stable.]
And a lot of the stability problem wasn't Win9x at all (at least once we got past the initial version of Win95) but rather was due to shit hardware and buggy drivers, or sometimes just plain poor design, like the 3-slot memory thing. (On boards with only 3 RAM slots, Win98 is limited to 512mb RAM. No such limit on boards with 4 RAM slots.)
Buying a cheapass system then complaining because Windows crashes is like buying a Yugo then complaining it can't last the first round of the demolition derby.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
No, it's not about any chip. Win95/98 had a 32-bit time counter incremented 100 times a second. The bug finally got patched one day, so this means your box runs a fixed version.
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No, it doesn't, it runs Win98 the first with NO patches (except the "device name in path" fix). My old Win95B box was never patched either, and didn't have the problem.
Last time this came up in a discussion, a bunch of people chimed in with similar remarks -- some boxes had the issue, some didn't, with identical OSs. And it's not uncommon for Windows to interact with something else's bug, in fact a great deal of what Windows does is work around someone else's bugs.
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As far as I know, most of the actual crashes happened in device drivers, not in core kernel. Time going back doesn't break the counter itself, just buggy consumers.
A bug in the timer chip? (Score:3, Informative)
Is this billg talking, cause he's also able to selectively distort the historical record when it suits him too.
" Symptoms: After 49.7 days of continuous operation, your Windows-based computer may stop responding (hang).
Cause: There is a pro
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Some Packard Smells were lucky and had good hardware in 'em; some had crap. I've seen 'em both ways. (We get all kinds of junk donated to the user grope, and I'm the hardware dude.) My understanding is that PB bought whatever surplus was cheapest and that's why no two runs of PB machines were alike. OTOH one of the toughest and best keyboards I've ever had is labeled PB (I'd like to know who really made it).
The trick with WinME was to 1) apply 98Lite in default mode, and 2) disable System Restore. After I d
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You are correct. I worked tech support for PB, and their first "2 gigabyte" hard drive consisted of a 1.2 gig and an 800 MB HDD basically taped together with a firmware alteration to make them act like one drive. Because they were physically paired together, one of the drives had a tendency to overheat (a funny thing that happens when you isolate the ASICs from any air circulation.)
In fact, this was the reason I started using Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
Wow. Just wow.
"very few users would gamble with multitasking under Win9x (except for things like running an IRC client, an MP3 player and a web browser at the same time). "
Sounds like actual, genuine multitasking to me. And hitting one of the soft spots, the TCP stack, pretty hard. Browsers of that era weren't much to write home about and were by themselves crash-worthy. MP3 players then were pus. mIRC was tolerable.
Just as a note, I weas running W4W 3.11, dialing into a local ISP and hitting my AOL account via TCP/IP pretty much every night. It would crash every 2-3 hours. Trumpet Winsock was all there was. Then I bought the Win95 upgrade (and a full version for a second machine running Slackware 0.9 at the time). the full version was entirely normal, but the upgrade ran without rebooting until the first patch came out, something about DUN I think. I know of no other machine that did that, not even any of my others. Scary. I was pained to reboot it, and it never ran more than a week after that. One theory was that some modules from the upgrade stayed in memory and I was running a transitional W4W driver somewhere, but that's insane.
Gates' claim that they wanted to clean up 95 and that meant leaving out file naming stuff that WP relied upon, though, is disingenuous and a lie. The same APIs were used heavily by Novell for their NetWare client in W4W, and that was a target - MS was dedicated to crushing the NetWare client. Novell kept coming back, but finally succumbed. And discussion about Gates' requirement to make APIs available to all is a lie also - it may have been a legal requirement, but it was ignored, and the Word team took full advantage of their insider access to Windows APIs. Isn't this settled fact, and one of the foundations of the now dying Justice consent decree/antitrust judgement? Really? We still discuss this?
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just FYI, W4W 3.11 was the first Microsoft 16-bit OS capable of running the 32-bit wolverine TCP/IP stack... which is also what Win95 ran. Wolverine was very reliable and stable for a Microsoft product.
My memory of such things is not reliable, but I think you could have downloaded wolverine onto your W4W3.11 system, ditched trumpet, and gotten the same increased network stability that you got from upgrading to Win95.
At the time I was running slackware linux systems that were incredibly painfully difficult to set up and get running, but then never, ever crashed for any reason. Mad shouts to Pat Volkerding!
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I worked at MindSpring/Earthlink back in that era, and I think it was a branded version of the Shiva dialer made famous by Netscape. It looked/worked very much like Win9x's DUN and worked pretty well. I still have my selection of discs in a closet somewhere, should pull it out for nostalgia's sake.
NT4 will always bring back more painful memories than almost any other OS of the era. It never failed you'd get the guy with no service packs, no RAS installed, and Internet Explorer 2.0 who couldn't find his disc
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Gates' claim that they wanted to clean up 95 and that meant leaving out file naming stuff that WP relied upon, though, is disingenuous and a lie.
I agree. I think even a non-technical person might be suspicious of that claim. "Yeah, by astonishing coincidence it just happened to be that the thing that you say was broken and had to be removed was the one thing that kept your competitors from being able to run on your platform. Right."
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win 3.11 ran those at the same time.. well.. if you had a fast enough pc(mp3..) and tweaked it.
but it is true that 1995 was the year of linux on desktop. it was superior in most ways to os/2 and win95 and certainly superior to desqview etc..
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All regular versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000 used cooperative multitasking. That's where the OS tells the IRC client, "OK, you have the CPU. Be nice and tell me when you're done with it so I can give it to the MP3 player next." A single misbehaved app which never gave back the CPU (or more f
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Insightful)
son, reality is a bitch.
but back in the days of 95... ... 95 didnt crash every day, it just got slower. also, it still ran on DOS. .....linux in that time might have run rock solid, but the X server crashed every day. so no, linux was not heaven.
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true, but in windows 95A, the first incarnation of 95, the DOS layer itself was possible to be run on itself, even allowing using win95 dos only on machines which did not support 95A. This way, 95A however was sometimes shipped as an update to existing machines with 311&DOS6.
So basically, with 95B the whole game changed, since the underlying DOS was only a bootloader, but the 95A version was not.
I ran a 386 back then, built from scratch parts, with 95A DOS and win32s and norton commander, pascal&del
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Even Windows 3.1 had a "real" kernel, which supported pre-emptive multitasking (between multiple DOS machines and a single Windows VM that ran all Windows processes). DOS in Windows 95, while it existed, did not run the show. It was kept around to support 16-bit Windows functionality and DOS apps and kind of ran as a library alongside Windows 95, which had an actual OS kernel (VMM32).
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Yes it did. But Windows apps couldn't use it. They all ran within a single pre-emptive task and cooperatively multi-tasked inside that address space (like fibers). Each DOS box was a separate pre-emptive task. Otherwise, there's no way to run multiple DOS programs at once. So ironically, it was easier to multitask DOS programs than Windows programs on 3.1.
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Windows 95 was infamous for crashing at least daily, I knew plenty of fairly knowledgeable people who took pride in being able to keep it running for a week.
I'm curious to know why was Windows 95 so unstable, then? What kind of error conditions were the causes of the constant crashes?
And how was is possible to have such severe bugs slip in? One could think it was written by well-paid professional engineers after all.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
OS/2 was preemptive, but the GUI had a single input queue, so a misbehaving application could grind the OS to a halt. That was my biggest frustration with the OS at the time. Ironically it could multitask Windows GUI and DOS Command Line applications better than Windows or DOS could, and also better than it could multitask OS/2 apps. If you made your application multithreaded and had one thread just for processing the input queue, you'd never have that problem in OS/2. Not even IBM ever actually did this.
To this day Windows suffers from the application processing the window frame controls. An application that takes a few seconds processing will sieze up and become unmovable. Eventually windows will detect this and allow you to perform some operations on the window. This is why X11 in Linux has always felt more responsive to me. Even if the application locks up, it's not responsible for handling its window frame controls, so you can still move, shade or minimize the application with no delay.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Informative)
That's because the window borders and title bar are handled in user-space libraries that run in the context of the client. If the client stops pumping messages, there's no way for these parts of the window to respond. There's no separate message pump or thread for them. It's stupid, but I guess it makes it easier for apps to customize the decorations by simply handling the non-client messages instead of passing them on to DefWindowProc.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Interesting)
This [msdn.com] has an interesting discussion on formatting issue. There was a lot of stuff in Win9x that sacrificed performance for compatibility. On the one hand it's kind of impressive that so much old stuff kept working, but it definitely held back Windows performance compared to contemporaries.
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To this day Windows suffers from the application processing the window frame controls. An application that takes a few seconds processing will sieze up and become unmovable.
I don't see anything wrong with that. A GUI application that doesn't pump its message loop on a timely basis is a buggy program. The fact that the window decoration is drawn by the default wndproc and thus occurs within the client message loop is just a way to make this bug in your program REALLY stand out. Would you rather not have co
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I saw an old OS/2 1.2/1.3 once -- IBM still supported it in the 2.1 timeframe for the US navy and some bank customers. It looked a lot like Windows 3.1. I also saw a lot of their open "demo" driver examples, and a lot of them had Microsoft copyrights, because OS/2 and Windows NT shared the same heritage. For a while IBM and Microsoft were collaborating on an OS before they decided to tak
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If they had put another 8MB in that shit would have worked. Too cheap to buy 2M sticks.
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No software for Linux??? Huh? That was never a problem certainly not by 1995. The people switching were Unix users and the Unix apps were being ported or had been ported. Heck they even had some desktop productivity like well WordPerfect. There was also StarOffice (became OpenOffice). There was LyX which was terrific. There were databases. A ton of programming languages.
Linux was rapidly becoming the most diverse Unix software environment around by then. Maybe IRIX or Solaris was better if you ha
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Informative)
I dont remember Linux crashing.
I do remember X crashing and Samba Crashing as well as other apps crashing, I dont remember any instances where the Core Kernel Crashed. I had linux as the core of a ISP from 1994-1999 and never had it crash on me outside of apps crashing and consuming memory.
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Isn't that like complaining that Ford cannot make safe cars because you installed cheap plastic wheels? Sure, they are an essential part of the system (video/wheels) but if the manufacturer of that product can't be bothered to quality control, how can you blame Ford?
(Woo! Car analogy.)
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One of the actually kind of impressive things I ran into with Vista was a box I had with a dodgy video card in it - every now and then, it'd just randomly show crazy stuff and hard lock or bluescreen [under XP]. It was a nice gaming card otherwise so I kept with it. Later on I stuck a copy of Vista on it I'd been given to learn it, and after awhile the graphics went wonky... then the screen blinked and a box popped up that a problem had been detected with my video hardware and it'd been reset. Went right on
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Informative)
The sad part is that sometimes I think you do actually believe what you're saying. If you do, you just have no idea of Microsoft's history.
We need to slaughter Novell before they get stronger."
-Former Microsoft VP James Allchin in a 09-9-91 e-mail (as revealed in Caldera v. Microsoft)
"This really isn't that hard. If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry -- you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions before hand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger." -Former Microsoft VP James Allchin in a 09-9-91 e-mail (as revealed in Caldera v. Microsoft)
"It is Microsoft's corporate practice to pressure other firms to halt software development that either shows the potential to weaken the applications barrier to entry or competes directly with Microsoft's most cherished software products."
-Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in the Microsoft antitrust trial
"Microsoft has demonstrated that it will use its prodigious market power and immense profits to harm any firm that insists on pursuing initiatives that could intensify competition against one of Microsoft's core products. ... The ultimate result is that some innovations that would truly benefit consumers never occur for the sole reason that they do not coincide with Microsoft's self-interest."
-Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson in the Microsoft antitrust trial
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Insightful)
If Apple had enticed Google into developing Android for them, then intentionally pulled the plug in order to cause serious harm and distract and delay them from developing Android in different ways, but claimed to be innocent of that, then yes that Jobs statement would be meaningful.
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Who said that's okay?
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Insightful)
Nobody is remotely claiming Microsoft shouldn't compete with their competitors. DUUUH. If you honestly think that is the issue at hand, maybe read TFA and do some research before commenting.
The problem is whether Microsoft unfairly led Novell to believe they were working together and they were going to support Novell's software, and then they internally decided to try to hamstring Novell and slow them down as much as possible. That sort of deceptive business practice is bad for competition and the free market.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Funny)
Suspicious? I'd be terrified.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Insightful)
And, I'm just as serious with my answer:
WHAT THE FUCK DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE WHETHER THIS IS ANY DIFFERENT THAN WHAT APPLE DOES?!?!?!?!
FFS, people, the world doesn't revolve around Microsoft and Apple. They are both pretty much the same - bullies, who are impossible to play with, unless you are willing to accept them changing the rules every couple of days.
Let me ask your question right back at you. Ted Bundy was a terrible person. But, how was he any different than Charles Manson? Does that help to understand that your question is really really close to being moronic? (And, the answer to my rephrased question would be, "No difference, they are both low life predators!)
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Funny)
Hey! That's not fair.
Ted Bundy was a violent psychopath and Charles Manson had a hippie cult of personality around him.
Wait, never mind. Continue.
(Although I don't think Ted Bundy threw chairs.)
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The only Linux crashes I remember from that time are when I misspecified memory sizes on the kernel commandline. Otherwise rock-solid. It was clear back then that in comparison Windows will continue to suck. And it does. Even Win7 is a sorry excuse for an OS where it counts: Reliability, Security, Performance, Simplicity and the tool-set it comes with.
Not even really suitable as a toy. And we are not talking VHS vs. BETAMAX here. VHS was at least halfway decent. Windows is not. The hours I have wasted on t
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I don't know what you're doing to your machine but I've been running 7 for over a year and I have yet to see it crash. I used XP for about 9 years on multiple PCs and had a system lock up on me maybe two or 3 times.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Insightful)
What are you talking about? Gnome 3 and KDE 4.x were huge steps back. Windows 7 is a huge step forward from Vista.
As much as it pains me to admit it, you're right (at least on Gnome - I haven't really used KDE much since the 2.x days). On Gnome 2 my system was running absolutely beautifully ever since early 2009 (which was when I basically transitioned to full-time Linux usage - I'd been dual-booting and using it off and on since 1998). Everything worked exactly as it should - aside from maybe getting some native game ports and a native iTunes, there's literally nothing that my system needed to do differently. Then somebody felt the need to "innovate". Everythings borked now. In Ubuntu 11.10 Unity is a disaster. Gnome 3 isn't even usable for me. Even if you install the Gnome fallback "classic" mode its gotten glitchy compared to the last release (flickering icons, slowdowns, problems with compositing - it almost feels like they sabotaged the classic mode as it's not working like it used to). Right now I'm doing my best to cobble together a usable XFCE setup, which is the lesser of many evils. It's not working exactly how I want but at least it feels like XFCE is working with the users rather than intentionally trying to piss them off.
Right now I'm anxiously awaiting Linux Mint 12. With their efforts to fix Gnome3 and support of MATE (Gnome 2 fork), they seem to be taking user concerns seriously, rather than Ubuntu and Gnome who are in a screaming match with the entire user base claiming that the users just don't really know what they want. Interestingly enough, if you check Distrowatch, Mint has unsurprisingly surpassed Ubuntu as the leader in page hits for the last 6 months. If you narrow that down to shorter time frames (like last 30 days), Ubuntu has fallen from #2 down several spots, with Mint in the #1 spot by a wide margin.
It's like Canonical is shooting itself in the foot while screaming how great it feels.
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I don't like the interface. I don't want the icons on the side. I most EXPLICITLY do not want my menus all at the top of the screen.
It simply doesn't behave how I want. If I'm to have a dock I want it at the bottom of the screen. I want desktop icons for frequently used programs and filesystem locations, and I want my menus to be placed at the top of the window to which they are associated.
Other things like the insane disappearing scrollbars I won't hold too much of a grudge over because they can be turned off, but its still indicative of the basically stupid ideas about UI that Ubuntu seems to be embracing.
I don't need some "revolution" in my "workflow". Workflow was something I have not had any issues with for years. I just want the system maintained and polished. When security holes are discovered, patch them. If you can make a program a little faster or more efficiently, do that. If a new awesome video codec or web standard comes up, then build in support for it. When new hardware comes out write drivers for it. The base UI is what has evolved from 25-30 years of big monitor + keyboard + mouse usage. It works. The new stuff you're seeing on phones is a direct result of different input methods (touch + a tiny screen). The desktop doesn't need to go that route because it doesn't operate under the same restrictions.
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It's easier to switch off to Enlightenment, than to learn a new way of doing K or G, or moving to Unity.
There's nothing new or different about KDE 4.x; it's the same UI it's always been. It's only Unity and Gnome that are trying to force everyone to use cellphone UIs.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Groklaw has a pretty good article. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hell look at how many corps are still running XP even though its two versions behind!
Look [statcounter.com] how many people are using Firefox 3.6 even though it's 5 versions behind!
Versions are a pointless distinction. It's simply that XP runs what they need, how they wanted it, and Vista did not do one or both of these tasks. I personally remember a field test where a proprietary application would simply not run on Vista and had to be partially rewritten to accommodate the changes in folders, permissions, and other things.
It's like the whole debacle with Linux interfaces (Gnome 3/Unity/KDE4) You can't expect to change people's environment as drastically as they've been doing and not get backlash.
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TL:DR? Novell had PLENTY of time to come out with a new product but instead hung onto the old code for too long and by the time they saw the train it ran them over.
They didn't hang onto the old code. Novell only owned WordPerfect between buying it in June 1994 and selling it to Corel in January 1996. (Technically, they did hold onto some of the WordPerfect libraries, which they integrated into GroupWoes.)
Remember WordPerfect? ha! (Score:5, Funny)
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
Re:Remember WordPerfect? ha! (Score:5, Funny)
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You're lucky. I didn't use WordPerfect, but used Multimate instead. Now, I have a bunch of Multimate documents that can't be converted into Word or OpenDocument formats.
Wrong summary!!! (Score:4, Informative)
"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".
Re:Wrong summary!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a list of defunct companies as long as the dictionary who thought they could trust Microsoft. Even the ones who profit in the short-term eventually discover that their product is now a free feature of the next version of $MicrosoftProductName$.
Re:Wrong summary!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wrong summary!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
In the last month before release I change every API call that you were using. Your program suddenly looses access to keyboard, screen, file system. You say "Hey, I already shipped the product! What's are the API changes?" -- "No changes, I removed it completely. There is an alternative API that MY text editor is using, if you want to know what it is, no problem, I will provide a spec in 6 months or so".
The point is, if you rely on my API, I can pull a rug from under your feet at any moment. It's a short leash you are on.
Adobe, Core, Autodesk, no one else had this problem.
Maybe it is because MS did not target them with a replacement of their own. The fact that MS did not manage to kill ALL non-MS software does not make them any less guilty.
Novell is killing babies now? (Score:5, Funny)
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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.
And lining up the lawyers to prevent other people from saving babies without paying him patent rights.
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BG is trying (and failing) to make up for all the evil he did. Not Novells fault.
Re:Novell is killing babies now? (Score:4, Insightful)
He's just trying to swing the karma bar from "scourage of the wasteland" to something more on the good side of the neutral line.
All old rich guys do this. They do really nasty evil things to get rich and then spend a little of their trillions trying to buy back their soul.
Re:Novell is killing babies now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Steve Jobs didn't seem to do that :p If he did, nobody found out about it. I find it hard to believe that nobody would find out if he did though.
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Sorry? 56 is OLD. I don't care what you old farts keep telling yourselves.
if you are over 50 you are O L D.
I'm 43, so I'm dancing with old, and I'm at least mature enough to admit it when I cross the old threshold.
Old starts at 35.. At that point you don't heal as fast as you used to, and you notice that losing weight take a LOT more effort than it did at 32.
he was old. Grey hair Old. Wise old, not like idiot 20 somethings that are far too uneducated to understand they are not invincible.
Even o
WOW, the bar for nasty evil must be real low (Score:2)
because I can think of hundreds of people rich or not who would be more in line for such a description of their activities, trouble is most are politicians and the like who apparently always get off free.
Frankly if Gates was nasty evil then Satan was a choir boy.
Re:Novell is killing babies now? (Score:5, Informative)
This was vintage Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep. Read Jerry Kaplan's book _StartUp_ for another side of this story.
How could this have sunk WordPerfect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Namespace extensions are things that let you mess with Windows Explorer and add your own contextual menus and folder layout. How could that sink a word processor? From the user's point of view, are they really not going to buy the word processor because they can't initiate feature X from explorer? I don't even know of any word processor that even has a feature like that, and it's been 15 years since Windows 95 came out.
I don't doubt that MS over-promised on what features the OS would deliver, given that they've done that with every OS release I can recall, but to say that they shelved a viable feature to sink Novell, and that it was actually the cause of Novell going under is a real stretch.
AP claim (repeated in summary) is confusing (Score:3)
"The company said Gates duped it into thinking he would include its WordPerfect writing program in the new Windows system then backed out because he feared it was too good."
The whole story seems to be about the namespace extensions thing. So where is Novell claiming that MS agreed to bundle WordPerfect with Windows?
Re: (Score:3)
Re:AP claim (repeated in summary) is confusing (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
they claim that the namespace extension thing was means to that end, apparently.
but WHAT THE FUCK? the namespace extensions thing doesn't really make any sense as a real reason for word perfect to be lagging from win95 release.. eh.. just rewrite the save and load dialogs? wtf were they doing at novell?
Why Anti-trust and not breach of contract? (Score:3)
I'm curious as to why this is not a contract dispute? I can only assume it is because no contract existed. If they had a contract with Microsoft that stated what the interface was supposed to be then they would be in violation of contract. If there was no contract and MS was just building an OS and told them the interface would be and then decided not to include it or change it there is no case.
Wordperfect did one thing every program should do. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Wordperfect did one thing every program should (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
I agree with you that Reveal Codes is a extremely helpful feature that is or should be standard on almost all current WordProcessing software. As someone who supports the 90% and 10% of WordPerfect Reveal Codes users, I can safely assume that this feature was not born out of innovation but necessity. I've been "fortunate" to support users using WordPerfect since WP8 and it is a notoriously buggy program that has trouble handling WP codes present in documents from older versions hence the birth of reveal c
Re: (Score:2)
So, go use LaTeX then.
Re:Wordperfect did one thing every program should (Score:4, Insightful)
Show Codes is the reason WordPerfect sucked. It was easy to accidentally delete an invisible end tag, and then the entire formatting of your document would be fucked. So you were pretty much forced to reveal the codes and tediously edit around them, which is suckwork for nerds.
I'm perfectly capable of marking-up HTML, but who wants to deal with that shit while you're writing.
Novell is Dying (Score:2, Insightful)
Very important stuff (Score:4, Interesting)
Very happy to see this judge refuse to throw this one out and make sure we all get to read about him in the press every day.
Re:Very important stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A brief history of sucky software (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What now? (Score:2)
Can someone care to enlighten me as to how not implementing these API into Windows back in the day could cause a $1 billion loss for WordPerfect? Or did "Name Space Extensions" mean something else back then? I just don't see how this relates to word processors, and the article even seems to confirm that suspicion with Bill Gates saying the feature didn't have word processors in mind.
WP had poor support back in the day (Score:5, Informative)
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.
WordPerfect killed itself (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wordplace.com]. 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.
Intentional comedy (Score:3)
"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."
Out of the jabillion things that made 95 crash, he just happened to focus on the one thing that was not in-house?
Not that Novell is looking any better.
Irony (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be great if the minutes from the hearing were typed up in OpenOffice :)
The horses are gone (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, this is about Win 95? (Score:3)
Well, I guess if you want to pick a beef you might as well go for it. One more question, am I the only person who never had Windows 95 blow up on them? I mean, going to 98 was a heck of a lot smoother, but I never had any problems with '95.
Statute of limitations? (Score:2)
Either way, unless there is some sort of tengible evidence beyond heresay proving that Microsoft had serious intentions to bundle WP, I don't think Novell will get anywhere here. Even then, Microsoft can tell any number of wendors or 3rd parties it intends to bundle a certain app or piece of functionality in, that doesn't make it true. This is generally why you sign contracts and letters of intention. I can remember lots of features in Windows OS's that w
I was there (Score:4, Insightful)
WordPerfect GUI SUCKED (Score:4, Insightful)
I was a huge WordPerfect DOS fan it was the best wordprocessor and interface was most intuitive I've ever seen. Then they tried to make a Mac version SUCKED horriblily and if I remember they killed the product and restarted and killed again. Then they tried to do a Windows version and it was so-so at best and it died a slow death. Their problem wasn't MS it was they never successfully make the transition from a DOS text to GUI platform.
Maybe they should sue Apple too for their problems.
I thought crashing was a feature (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
I'd save the "clearly not intentional" until after the court's findings. I most certainly wouldn't put it past them, especially not back then.