Microsoft, marked with the scarlet letter “A” (for “antitrust”), is still paying for yesterday’s sins. Today, the Supreme Court ruled that a private antitrust suit brought on by Novell against Microsoft for crushing WordPerfect can proceed. Microsoft had tried to block the suit on the grounds that the statute of limitations had run out (the alleged crushing of Novell having occurred a dozen years ago) and that Novell did not compete in the operating system market (WordPerfect is a word processor). No dice, says the Supreme Court.
It is hard to remember now, but at one point (in 1990) WordPerfect had nearly 50 percent of the word processor market. That dwindled to under 10 percent six years later because of, um, incompatibilities with Windows. Bloomberg reports:
Novell says the value of WordPerfect fell from $1.2 billion in May 1994 to $170 million in 1996, when the company sold the program to Corel Corp. Novell, based in Waltham, Massachusetts, is seeking three times its losses.
So that is potentially $3 billion, on top of the $5 billion Microsoft has already paid out to everyone from Sun Microsystems to AOL (Time Warner). And that includes $536 million it has already paid to Novell for partially settling antitrust claims over its Netware operating system. Plus, the European Union has withdrawn a total of $2.6 billion (€1.68 billion) in fines over the years from the Microsoft ATM. It sure is expensive being a monopoly.
One person who must be feeling good about all this is former Novell CEO Eric Schmidt, who as Google’s current CEO still likes to point out Microsoft’s scarlet “A” every chance he gets.
They can afford it.
I think they should claim for future losses as well, if they were still 50% percent of the market today (that would be millions of $’s they’re loosing). But that would be a hard battle to determine the losses of future $’s.
Incompatibilities or WordPerfect just got left behind when the word processing world went WYSIWYG.
Incompatibilities or WordPerfect just got left behind when the word processing world went WYSIWYG.
This is just sour grapes. I’m no Microsoft fan, but offices across America could have continued to use WordPerfect or any other word processor. It is a shame that a company can develop a product, crush the competition in the competitive market place, then end up being sued. Anti-trust laws need to go.
No Novell, please please NO!
Your product failed because it wasn’t any good. All those key combinations. All that lack of WYSIWYG.
This was back in the days when Word and Excel trounced the competition because they were simply better, faster, easier to understand, more compatible etc etc.
Please please don’t! Grow up!
Can someone describe these incompatibilities?
Ah ah. Is the TC boss going to call Microsoft the US cash machine now??
Is it awful for me to think that a creator of an operating system should have the right to make any software compatible or incompatible? There is only so far that an OS manufacturer could act that way before the market responds with consumers using other operating systems. Novell should have absolutely no standing to sue, and it is a shame that this frivolous lawsuit can now continue.
if this goes ahead and they win it will set a precedance against all business’s not just in tech. Can you imagine the onslaught companies from google , ebay , etc could face in future years ?
Its part of business and these antitrust suits are killing the business arena. Flaming americans and their law suit culture.
How many week’s profits was that again, for an additional $3b?
With many free Office Suites (star office) and online office suites making bloatware like Word nearly obsolete- I wonder if this case is still worth pursuing!
Mike is right. I can see the new tv ads from slip-and-fall lawyers now: “Do you run a business and just can’t out-compete the competition? Call us, and we’ll sue the pants off those bastards!”
Even if they lose, with a daily net income is about $52 million i’m sure its not going to burn a huge hole in Microsoft pockets.
I remember WordPerfect. All those special codes you had to type in. Then the rest of the world went WYSIWYG. Unfortunately all the wiki idiots never got that memo and we are back to what it was like in the WordPerfect days.
Seems like a messy case. Fine, WP may have been inferior, but Microsoft has a history of making competitive products difficult to run on their platform. Vista makes dual-booting with Linux very hard… and didn’t Windows cause problems for Netscape Navigator?
Oh yes, there will be blood.
Raza Imam
http://SoftwareSweatshop.com
We the jury find M$ GUILTY of unethical behavior.
Next case!
Having lived through the office wars, I can say without a doubt that WordPerfect wasn’t crushed because of unfair competition from Microsoft. WordPerfect made repeated, unbelievable mistakes in underestimating the importance of the WYSIWYG interface. While Word innovated, WordPerfect sat and assumed that 50% market share represented some kind of unbreakable domination.
WordPerfect’s incompetence ended up taking down Borland as well. In the early 90’s. corporations started standardizing on MS Office because of the expected benefits from fully integrated suites of office productivity software (word processor, spreadsheet, database) and the discounts that came with bundling. At the last hour, Borland tried to make a stand against Microsoft by bundling Quattro Pro and Paradox- at the time the highest rated products in their category- with WordPerfect. Despite an agreement between WP and Borland, WordPerfect dragged their feet and did practically nothing to integrate their product with Borland’s software. As a result, the Borland-WP suite never stood a chance against Office.
It’s amazing that a company as incompetent and inferior as WordPerfect (acquired by Novell) would file this kind of complaint. Borland should sue WordPerfect for breach of contract if WordPerfect actually wins in this sham of a case. Novell deserves nothing.
Guilty as charged
Two things:
One, Wordperfect was much easier to use then Word was or is. Word has bugs from ten years ago that have never been fixed. I was using Wordperfect back in 96-97 and switched to Word because of…incompatibilities.
I was not a sophisticated user of Wordperfect but I remember so clearly having to deal with all of the bugs in Word and whatever work-arounds one could think of.
If Word really was superior to Wordperfect, M$ would have had no qualms about allowing compatibility.
Second, why is it when another company is trying to get money out of Microsoft for its anti-competitive behavior its ok and is reported as straight news, but when its the (EU) government anti-trust unit its reported as a shakedown?
That post was awful, did you even read the article you linked to?
I remember the sign of a master of WordPerfect: the damn function-key template glued permanently to their keyboard. And they think that it was unfair competition that did them in?
And one other thing…sooner or later someone is going to point out to a judge (at an opportune moment) the long list of companies who have sued Microsoft – a list the very size of itself causes one to question how anyone could think that Microsoft had a monopoly on anything?
Perhaps an interesting point of information here is that the Supreme Court was actually one of the longest “WordPerfect Holdouts.” For a long time after Word was clearly the winner of the wordprocessing wars, the Supreme Court was still publishing opinions in the “standard” ASCII and WordPerfect formats. Much of the rest of the legal community and many state court systems also continued to use WordPerfect long after its day was done in other realms. Perhaps because of the influence of the Supreme Court?
So, while some may argue the good or bad points of Wordperfect, it may be important to consider that some of the justices are likely to be disgruntled users. Even monopolists should beware the wrath of disgruntled users…
bob wyman
#21- those function key templates were truly awful, although you’d walk into offices where every secretary had one and swore by WordPefect. All you had to do was join the cult and memorize 75 function key combinations.
Of course, WP in their brilliance assumed that the loyalty of those users would protect their market position. As it turned out, it was business executives and IT mangers who decided which word processor companies would standardize on. Secretaries weren’t involved in that type of decision-making, and their loyalty didn’t give WP much of anything at the end of the day.
If WordPefect wins, it will be interesting to see if they try and convince the judges to re-instate the function template by court order.
@18, @23 – echo.
to LACJ(#20): That wasn’t “anti-competitive” behavior, this was “competitive behavior” as Microsoft was competing with WordPerfect and won. “Anti-competitive” behavior is when you take your competition to court for producing a more successful rival product.
Fail, sue, seek settlement = the novell business plan
Some folks are missing the point. Who uses WordPerfect now? 3 people in an ancient-tech museum. I’d love to be able to quit my job, live off the land for 10 years, then come back to society and claim I should have $3 Billion because that’s how much I WOULD HAVE MADE if I actually had a brain.
Since this is a post of opinions, and no one is really stating facts, the opinion that MS simply built a better product is in the lead. If anyone is stating a fact that I missed, except for the point about the glued-on keyboard templates, I hope to see supporting documents…I thought not.
Please, don’t bash the EU, MS, Americans, Iraqis, Europeans, Novell, etc. since it usually shows unprofessional behavior. Of course, no one will listen to me because it’s more interesting when we read childish gibberish.
I believe that since Microsoft used a strategy to market their Office products, it can be construed as a competitive plan, unless you’re the competition, in which case its anti-competitive. (In other words: “It sucks to be you.”) Does anyone remember “Ami Pro”???
Yet another money hungry company – WordPerfect SUCKED
I thought Novel and MS where working together!!
I guess the US Supreme court is full of European Socialists
Sometimes a little push is required. To some comments here, Not only Novell, many others, in the past and as for today, MS made the competition software to fail as programs. That was done intentionally. They did not provide information, neither on time or later about the operating system so what the competition could do? Lets say, in this case, a Word Processor, while they gave all information anticipated to the excel and word programmers teams. The information about Win32 was incomplete and buggy on the part shared to the competition. Simply imagine, the battery cars manufactures did not have on time information about the needs of the new models, they start giving that information to you a year latter, while, let say LTH had id on time? what would be your chance to compete? How long will it take for you to have the product designed, manufactured and tested, while all around the market they will have already LTH?.
That is how MS killed Lotus 123, WordPerfect and others. The same did for networking incompatibilities,and many other things.
I was around when people were actually using Word Perfect. It was a very fast application for people who used it, eg, people who typed a lot of stuff. You could create a document without touching a mouse. I had to convert some of these people to Word and they didn’t like it. Mousing is slow. Word Perfect fitted these people well. The idea that any idiot should be able to produce a well formatted document using a mouse has a few problems.
WP was also beloved of people who needed special features, especially, in the creation of legal documents. These used a lot of standard clauses that could be inserted easily, again without the mouse, plus a few other other tricks that made the printed document a bit tamperproof. These people hung on to the end.
The later versions on WP lacked stability, but it appears that this was due, to some degree, to Microsoft engineered crashes.
Word is a good product but it was aimed at the general user not at the expert.
Does anyone remember Multi-Mate by Ashton Tate? Now that was a friendly word processor. WordPerfect was already an inferior product in the late 80’s. I created lots of technical manuals with WP because it was the company standard and hated every minute. In fact, I don’t like MS Word all that much. The auto-formatting is always re-arranging the typed-in text and the rulers keep shifting. However, Word is clearly a better product than WordPerfect and Novell should admit it.
Does anyone remember how bad WordPerfect was? The judge on this case should be forced to use WordPerfect for a week. The case will get thrown out in a second.
It’s sad to see companies still seeking reparations for their own product missteps.
WordPerfect cost money and MS. was including words for free.
where the competition in that.
destroyed WordPerfect to open the door for MS.Office
#21,23 The reason secretaries and the supreme court loved wordperfect is that a keyboard-only interface (even with the awkward keystrokes) is much faster than mousy pointy clicky movements.
The uses that needed the most efficient user interface are the ones that held onto word perfect as long as possible.
Thanks to M$ the secretaries and supreme courts of the world is now only 90% as efficient as they would have been if word perfect was given the opportunity to compete.
And that is the point, while M$ programmers were ‘crafting’ their beautiful WYSIWYG interface the wordperfect programmers were left in the dark with non existent, incomplete or buggy API specifications.
In favour of MS, it should be noted that they had put a lot of money into Word development in those years when WP was the leader.
Versions 3,4,5,6 – they were coming out every… what?… couple of years, and you could see the next version (5 and 6, as I remember) was a significant improvement, probably complete re-write of the application.
(As for bugs, before C++ smart pointer were invented, what C program was without them?
But… MS did have an unfair advantage: they were also producing the OS for their office software. All things like DDE, DDEML, OLE, OCX, COM – their initial (if not primary) purpose was to integrate documents. So – new OS comes and next to it, the new office software that is using new OS capabilities – so better than previous version, so much more integrated. And competition? It runs to catch up with MS!
The same was with compilers. MS C++ was behind Borland in features (comand line compler output in MS – so primitive for IDE, but still there
. But MS compiler was faster, and the code it produced was better optimized. Ppl who write OS know how to write libraries for that OS.
So MS had an advantage, and used it fully to its own advantage. Fair or not.
The Sherman Antitrust Act
Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, and, on conviction thereof, shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000,000 if a corporation, or, if any other person, $350,000, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years, or by both said punishments, in the discretion of the court.
Absolutely disgusting, I’m assumed of these courts and this is merely a ploy by that Google idiot to try and get enough money off of Microsoft to stop them purchasing what they need to do away with his search engine.
This case is damn idiotic and just another conspiracy against Microsoft by the Google overlords, they are the one with the monopoly and once this case is bought and won, Google will have their own case in respect to their shit web based word processor!
Never used WP but in this discussion it’s irrelevant how good or bad WP really was; in most sports and competitions (that I know about) you are not allowed to strangle your opponent… IT’S JUST NOT FAIR why should this be different? (playing chess against a good adversary? break his hands – you should have a really easy win after that)
Why would M$ Office win out on WP on the gruonds of WYSIWIG? Office never was WYSIWIG, just YWSWYG (you will see what you get).
In the past, when I was doing TeX documents, I exactly knew what I got in the end, or when I didn’t I did a preview. Either way, in the end I knew the document would display and print exactly the same on any other computer and even OS!
MS Office documents on the other hand tend to slightly differ from computer to computer, from preview mode to printing, or even from minor version update to next version update! WYSWIG? Never been there. I prefer an honest program that reliably produces the results _I_ want, TY
Btw., all the antitrust cases are related to MS abusing their monopoly on their _OS_, not on their other programs (like Office). So it’s stupid to claim it won over competition because their programs worked better. They made competitor’s products incompatible to their newest versions of their OS, and _that_ is what it’s all about.
Just a thought. The Former CEO of Novell is now the CEO of Google…. And Microsoft wanted to By Yahoo, and Google want to buy Adobe. So, if MS give Google $30b then they can go ahead….something smells fishy here. I dont think this whole thing is about WP in the least. Its Google trying to fund theyre bitchslapping of MS! With MS’ Money! Its cheeky, but Genuis!
In the 90s WP was my word processor of choice. Now since MS dominates the market MS-Word is my standard choice due to compatabilities with my client base and partners. However, I still come up with times when I say “man MS-Word is a pain. I could so easily do this with WordPerfect”. In fact I still pull up WordPerfect at times when I have a special layout to do.
Microsoft out marketed Borland too and though I was also forced to change to Access (which was inferior to Paradox and OjectPal) I painstaking re-tooled to Access. It was all a pain and cost but necessary to do to stay with the times and to support the customer base.
You know…. seems to me the same was true for Novel Netware. It too was out marketed and we switched our networking platform.
Hooray for marketing! Boo for marketing!
Ed Woods
Chief Science & Technology Officer
http://www.sunc...ingpartners.com
Jeff S. – Sorry I disagree. Microsoft used its monopoly of the operating system to wall out Wordperfect. That’s anti-competition. If Microsoft really believed the Word was superior they should have allowed compatibility, then there would be a level playing field, and consumers could choose which program they wanted to use. That didn’t happen, consumer choice was restricted, and in my personal opinion Microsoft will never be required to pay back as much as they received through their anti-competitive behavior.
Wordperfect is still used widely in the legal sector at least, but I would not go so far as to say that is due to Word being inferior. I would instead chalk it up to inertia.
Ah.. WordPerfect… right around the same era as Aldus Pagemaker ?.. Any others big around that time – Claris?
What utter rubbish. WordPerfect died because it failed to innovate – its Windows versions were horrible and tried to be a DOS program running in Windows. Word was easier to use – that’s why it lost.
There are either too many short memories or nobody was around early win95. The incompatibilities caused not only WYSIWYG errors with fonts and printinge, but also the world famous crashes of WP. There were real problems with WP & OS. Not so apparent problem with IBM Warp. Or does no one remember WARP? To say WP didn’t have WYSIWYG is nothing short of ignorance.
Microsoft don’t “intentionally” make their OS incompatible with older software. When developing updates to an OS, things get added/changed, and somethings end up being removed [to be more accurate "deprecated"].
And, their own software ends up with the same incompatibility issues… every try running MS VC++.NET 2003, on windows vista? you get a nice big “this program is incompatible with this version of windows” error message.
Also, if a program end up being so “incompatible” with the new OS, it’s not such a hard task to UPDATE the program, and release a new version!!
I never used WordPerfect [and I don't like Word much either], but Novell is just acting like a baby, who’s lolly got taken away….
I worked in a Mac lab in college and used Word 2.0. Word on the Mac was a great program. Then, I took a desktop publishing class and had to use WP 5.1. I have never used such a HORRIBLE program in my entire life. The only way to get anything useful out of it is if you understood the raw printer codes being sent to the printer. And the output NEVER looked like the print preview. Without fail, it always messed up any type of layout. I wasted hours trying to get a decent looking 3-column layout with embedded images.
And I did use the Windows version, and it was still bad. I also used many other programs on Win95, and never had the problems I had with WP. “World famous crashes?”… I blame the shoddy WP product.
Oh, and for #47 above… I worked with desktop publishing software on Macs 15 years ago… and WP didn’t have WYSIWYG!
Short memories everyone…
WordPerfects failure to run under Win95 was due to “a distribution error” from Microsoft that happened to send a faulty compiler shipment to Novell… They “apologiesed” afterwards that it was an “error”… After WordPerfect had lost its marked share…
The “error” strangely coincided with a much hyped relaunch of Microsofts own word processing program “Word”…
The rest is history… But now it seems they are allowed to sue Microsoft for the “mistake”…