Microsoft Wins WordPerfect Antitrust Battle With Novell

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."

Re:Does Groklaw claim to provide balanced analysis

[Eggplant62]

Groklaw's original mission was to show that SCO's case against IBM was a load of malarky from the get go, using nothing but the facts and evidence provided in the case by each side's legal briefs. I don't know if that's bias, but Groklaw and PJ have proven over and over that they seem to know both the facts and the law and get it right every single time.

Re:RIGHT - Microsoft wins corrupt judge. Appeal ne

[Anonymous Coward]

This case is irrelevant.

Windows 95 is history.

Novell is just looking for some sort of revenue stream for its outdated business.

This is also a lesson in that the legal system is too slow for the technology industry. It's 2012 and they're in court over Windows 95 ?!

So it's 2012; what is Novell doing to stay relevant in a handheld computing World?

We all like to bash the movie and music industries for trying to keep their "outdated" business models working. This is no different. We have a mostly dead company going after an old stodgy company while the rest of the computing industry is moving along.

I guess this article would be more of an interest to legal geeks.

Re:RIGHT - Microsoft wins corrupt judge. Appeal ne

[Chrisq]

This case is irrelevant.

Windows 95 is history.

No this case is relevant because WordPerfect is history.

Re:Groklaw provides FACTS.

[satch89450]

Novell still could make some kinof comeback this way and sell the product for $10 I know millions of peopluld buy it instead of $125 Office student.

Are you sure? I've switched from Microsoft Word to LibreOffice (nee OpenOffice) and stopped looking back. And before you say "Linux nerd" I run the package on three platforms: Linux, Macintosh, and Windows. LibreOffice satisfies my needs to do techical documentation for a Fortune 5000 company, and does so without breaking the bank.

And, lest you forget, WordPerfect's "niche" was in law offices. Before GUIs. When you needed sensible keyboard shortcuts to keep your productivity up. Those days are long gone. Everyone has pretty much the same shortcuts, so there is no advantage of one word processor over another on that score.

Novell would need to something really, really interesting and useful to break through the reduced competition.

Because WP6 was so perfect, right?

[Megane]

I can remember back in the day with other people using WP6 for Windows how they would tell it to print and it would get confused about which text to put where on the page. I'm sure that was all Microsoft's fault, right? Or how the serious users of WP for DOS would use the show codes mode all the time, which doesn't go very well with WYSIWYG editing. Some of WP6's problems were entirely WP's fault.