1. If I develop a new web browser, one that everyone loves and uses, but I make it so it only runs on a Mac, can Microsoft sue me?

2. If I develop a great new website, one that gets a trillion hits per day, but only runs under Firefox, can Microsoft sue me?

3. If I develop a great new operating system, and everyone in the world switches to my operating system within 2 weeks, is it my responsibility to make sure that MS Word runs well on my operating system?

Really, I’m thinking of out developing and out marketing Microsoft, can they sue me for that? If I were Microsoft, I’d start filing law suits against every company that develops a product that doesn’t work with Windows ; )

So let’s look at this in today’s market. Apple has an OS on the iPhone/Touch and blocks and breaks applications it doesn’t approve of. There is a secret API that only Apple is allowed to use (they have said as much). Apple’s actions of blocking 3rd party stuff, like flash, can be looked at as really blocking competition. Flash would be a way for companies to offer music and movie services on the iPhone/Touch without going through iTunes.

So do we wait until someone rules Apple a Monopoly and then retroactively sue them for everything in the past?

It’s hard to discount the comments from those who were there, but if the leaders of WordPerfect were so inept, how did they create a product with 50% market share in a competitive market (don’t forget they bankrupted Micropro, and won out over Multi-Mate and SMART Suite by Innovative Systems). Losing that much market share in two years takes extraordinary circumstances. The user pain of sharing data across applications was tremendous, and MS was able to sell a better solution to that problem because they had, dare I say, an unfair advantage. IT and business managers knew MS ultimately had the upper hand in the game, so hedging in that direction offered more job security.

You need only see Steve Ballmer going around and behaving the way he does to KNOW MS would do ANYTHING to crush the competition, and they would think they are absolutely entitled to do so.

So WP sucked for some users. Word sucks for some users as well.

I remember using Word on a Mac years ago (system 9.1 or so) and Word installed all sorts of junk over the system, apparently not trusting good, stable pieces of system software which did exactly the same as MS’s counterparts. Could that be that MS KNEW that if someone (Apple in this case) messed with the system in a future release a word-processing (or any other) program could be MADE to become unstable and ‘buggy’?

I don’t agree with Microsoft if it committed a hit job on the software, but I think there is a high standard of proof that must be met in order to prove that happened.

I also don’t think Eric Schmidt has any room to talk about monopolies.

I suggest everyone take a look at the history of WordPerfect on Wikipedia. It seems that Microsoft designed its OS nicely, but Novell lacked the foresight to adapt its application structure.

Examples:
>>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).

>>WordPerfect for Windows still used the WordPerfect character set as its internal code. This caused WordPerfect for Windows to be unable to support some languages — for example Chinese — that were natively supported by Windows

>>Corel charged its customers to receive, what amounted to, a bug fix. [for WordPerfect compatibility on Windows NT]

http://sharkrid...y-of-microsoft/

WP had WYSIWYG down long before MS did; people didn’t use it much because the hardware couldn’t handle the load. Same was true of Word at the time. People could get more work done using the text interface most of the time & then using the graphical interface as a final check before printing.
You didn’t have to use the function keys – a mouse interface every bit as good as Word’s was available on the later versions. But everyone who typed for a living learned the function keys because it was FAST. Even a poor typist like me could produce good looking documents in a fraction of the time it takes with even the latest version of Word. I still curse MS for not providing or hiding the keystroke equivalents.
WP had print drivers (that worked!!!) for every printer you could imagine. Compare that to Vista users of Word.
The Supreme Court uses WP because the entire legal profession standardized on WP in the late 80’s and many legal firms still use it. Why? Because even an old copy of WP still works better than Word for quickly creating highly formatted documents. Lawyers are not known for sentimental attachments, if Word did the job, they would have dumped WP long ago.
The US military had also standardized on WP and gave it up only reluctantly in the late 90’s when Word dominated the desk tops of the defense Industry.
All that said – it has taken the owners of WP a very long time to pursue this & it does look like sour grapes at this late date.

The same can be said about Netscape v/s IE. I was a die hard Netscape fan with versions 1 & 2, but IE 3 won me over. Netscape 4 and above were such complete wastes of time that even if MS did not stifle them (which I admit they did) IE ver 3 – 6 was simply a better product.

That said MS now seems to have totally fallen off the band wagon, as I won’t touch IE7, Vista, or Office 2007 with a 50 mile pole. In fact I’m sending this post from FireFox.

People will always gravitate towards the better product… eventually.

How about OS/2 which would run Windows? Well, it seemed every month or so there was a small change in Windows which would stop it from functioning properly under OS/2 until IBM made a patch. Was this because OS/2 couldn’t hack it? Or maybe Windows is just better? Well, there might have been some legitimate changes to Windows that broke it, and IBM definitely screwed up marketing/promoting/selling OS/2, but again MS was protecting their product by stopping some other company’s superior product from working.

While both IBM, Digital Research and WordPerfect may have had some issues, and not done things correctly, there is no doubt that Microsoft intentionally caused problems for them and many others. This behavior must not be tolerated!! I’m not saying WP should win or loose this case, but companies MUST be held to some level of ethical standards, or we ALL LOOSE!

My real problem is what happened to Ami Pro. I’m not really sure if it was incompatibility due to lack of insight into the operating system (which MS had) that made them unable to make a Windows 95 version or if it was something else, but while they were lagging, they lost enough revenue to be snatched up and ruined by IBM. IMO Ami Pro’s disappearance was the greatest blow to the graphical word processor industry. It has caused the way we interact with word processors to stagnate. That is the true competition crushing that MS did.

This “best-of-breed” vs. “suite” was the key point in office competition from the early 80’s (when ALL-IN-1 as the first dominant “suite” on minicomputers) to when Microsoft Office won on the PCs and made all other products irrelevant. The “best-of-breed” applications always eventually lost *every* battle — as do virtually all point-products that attempt to attack a platform.

To drive the point just a bit further… All-IN-1 regularly beat or replaced the excellent Wang wordprocessors in hundreds of companies. Yet, the “Word Processor” in ALL-IN-1 was “EDT” which had little more capability than Notepad on Windows does. Also, the minimum system price for ALL-IN-1 was something like $1 million. The Wang guys could never understand how we beat them with such a lousy editor and such an expensive initial price. Well, we were selling a customizable, integrated platform. They were selling a best-of-breed product. There was *never* any question who would win.

bob wyman

MS approached us about using Word and showed off the product to us. We really liked the Word/Excel combination and the presentation thing was cool, too. We wouldn’t get a special deal — it actually cost more than the current set of tools we were using, but they were selling on cost/value/productivity.

We called WordPerfect to ask about their pending product plans. Guess what? They didn’t return our call. Instead, they sent us a brochure about the product we *already* had installed. We were a decent size customer to them, and they ignored us. When we called to them we were discontinuing our contract, they said “ok, thanks.”

Now, if anyone wants to talk about generalities of why WP was better than Word or vice versa, go right ahead. But if you want to know what really caused the market shift, go ask the sales teams.

The platform always wins. I know because I was there when this was happening and I regularly told people at Microsoft that what we were building would inevitably lead to monopoly in the office space on Windows. I knew this since I had seen exactly the same thing happen with my product — ALL-IN-1 — at Digital before coming to Microsoft. I went to Microsoft precisely because I saw that Microsoft could do with Windows (and a bit of component technology) exactly what we had done at Digital in the 80’s with ALL-IN-1. (By combining “inferior” products with superior integration and customizability, we were able to grow from virtually no presence in the office market to over 50% market share in a couple years. In the process, we beat not only IBM’s PROFS product but also crushed WANG…) Wordperfect should have seen it coming. Few may remember this, but they had a VMS based product as well. But, that product was never able to be much more than just a “plug-in” to ALL-IN-1. They tried to fight the platform, ALL-IN-1, on VMS but didn’t get anywhere. They learned the invincibility of platforms a second time when they tried to fight the platform on Windows.

You can’t beat the platform — especially if the guys who are building that platform KNOW what they are doing and WHY they are doing it.

bob wyman

(Someday, I’ll write a book…)