Novell's WordPerfect Antitrust Suit Ends In Mistrial 98
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."
Re:Why was this a jury trial? (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.
Re:I just read TFA (Score:3, 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.
Re:The MS is on the other foot (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.
Re:I totally remember this! (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.