poor business decisions?

isn't microsoft's idea of a poor business decision by its competitors anything other than rolling over and playing dead?

Let's hear it for the discovery process alone!

Having used both WP and the "other" program since the DOS days (and virtually every incarnation since) I've a lot of sympathy with Novels position - the initial WP for Windows release was horrifically integrated into Windows ... to the point of being unusable - and lo and behold, as WordPerfect floundered ... 'orrible Office was released with (and I chose my words carefully here) "Turd for Windows" ... the programmatic workspace equivalent of Typhoid Mary ... with a bright smile and a chocolate prophylactic.

Times have changed ... the current Corel WordPerfect is (and has been for many years) a joy to write with ... yet Word continues to be a festering sore on the arse of mankind. I use both on a regular basis - Word because I have to, and WordPerfect because I enjoy it ...

I would love this lawsuit to come to court and see what else craws out from under the rocks in Microsoft ...

WP was Awful

WP has always been a user-unfriendly package. From the days of WP 5.1 on through the Windows versions, it's always been harder to use than Office.

Wordperfect was the dominant word processor, but they lost market share because Office was easier to use and offered more features. There's no reason that the GUI version of Wordperfect that was used in Win 3.1 would not have worked in Win95 anyway.

I wish companies would try to write good, usable software instead of wasting money that could be put into development in a lawsuit.

@Adam Cutchin

Microsoft is both the provider of the OS and a competitor in offering a competing product.

Since Microsoft is a monopoly (meaning its been found to be a monopoly by the US courts), it must conduct itself in such a way that it doesn't favor its product development at the expense of others. Meaning acting in an anti-competitive way.

On the surface, the Novell case has merit. As you point out, Microsoft acts in an anti-competitive way... ;-)

Poor business decision

Microsoft is right in calming that Novell scuppered WP by poor business decisions.

The decision in question being to believe Microsoft

what has changed?

Isn't this still happening today, in various guises? Aren't APIs still either protected, or constantly changing? I always thought it was due to either incompetence, or a desire to charge people to learn new ways to do old things... but now we learn it's to constantly trip up the competition...

So love

Got no love for a company that wont genuinely win or loose a competition. Reminds me of the Gladiator movie. Before the final battle the Emperor sticks the gladiator with a knife to limit his ability to defend himself. I never cheered so hard in my life when I saw the crowed cheer when he still lost and his guards just left him laying in the dirt! I will cheer just as hard when M$ collapse from mounting bad karma... Every year I feel more and more sure this will happen. Eventually the money and bullying wont save them.

Glimmer of hope

An organization usually looks like its leaders. In M$'s case: unwashed, unimaginative and arrogant.

But now that Billy has quit, there is a glimmer of hope that the business practices will change. It will take time. But maybe, just maybe, they will start to compete on quality instead of sheer brute force.

We would all gain from such a move and M$ more than the others. Because releasing quality software will give them a real advantage which they won't have to challenge in court all tht time.

Fully Justified ....... and way ahead of the Game?

"But the software giant claims Novell's particular case is unjustified because Novell wasn't selling an operating system at the time, and therefore, not in direct competition."

Actually, that is a totally and probably intentionallly misleading erroneous suggestion as a word processing suite IS an Operating System and the Prime of any Operating System. And it is always ITs Primary Driver too.

And even today, Control of Words/Knowledge is the Power which Guarantees Control....... which is why Beta Use of them is Monitored and in some cases rather than being Shared, snaffled and hidden away until such times as they are not so revealing.

Just ask anyone who is into Mastery of the Universe and Global Operating Devices via ITs Virtualisation Channels.

All Engines, Full Speed ahead, Cap'n ........ into NeuReality Virtually ...... AIDomains and the Semantic Territory of Imperfect Dominion and ITs Universal Control.

Eh? Wot?

So was it Microsith's spell checker or WP's that allowed the word "Octover" into the graphic in the original story?

Me next!!

I'm a manufacturer of slate writing tablets. I'm going to sue microsoft because their being anti-competitive to my business.

Come to think of it, I'll sue typewriter manufacturers, and those early 'electronic type writers' (aka word processors), and come to think of it, I'll sue all the electric companies for making it all possible.

Get over it people, Darwin was (nearly) right - survival of the one with the biggest advertising budget.

If your software doesn't sell, you need to look inwards first, and only blame other people to cover the truth!

Word Perfect was already going down hill

I remember using Word Perfect under Windows 3.0 and it was impossible to use c1991. So much so that my boss at the time would not use Windows at all and used MS-DOS just so he could write things up.

The rest of us in the office used Letter Perfect, a stripped down version of WP that ran under DOS. It had a graphical viewer for print previewing that was alot more accurate than the DOS screen. Being stripped down you could use it for it was designed for - writing simple manuals, letters, faxes and memo's. We don't have memo's any more!!

I think this is the point that WP started to loose market share. They got too big for their boots and though that they could release any old sh!te and get away with it. The version of Office for Windows 3.11 was far superior and popping up in more and more places in the following years.

This is probably why MS decided to knife WP at a very critical point and leave the field clear for themselves. I hope MS looses big time. Their Office suite is just bloat - megabytes of unneeded rubbish getting in the way of producing documents. I would rather use VI.

Word far from perfect back then...

While I agree that the latest version of Word is THE word processor, back then (when the DOS prompt wasn't a skill, but a necessity), Word Perfect was what everyone used (emacs doesn't count people!).

Had wordperfect had the opportunity to grow under Novell, there is no reason it couldn't be at the same level that Word is today. Well, assuming Novell hadn't off-loaded it to Corel to mess up anyway...

I thought Novell and Microsoft had a love tie-in to prevent such lawsuits anyway?

Quiet, gentlemen! We are entering the Windosphere!

What the frack are "shell extensions"? Are they hard, pointy things?

What about Os/2

Nobody has mentioned yet the wrong-footed way WP got sent over OS/2, during the Win vs OS/2 in the early 90's which sent WP down the wrong path to begin with, after that they always seemed to be playing catchup in the race to Win95. Also WP were definitely going down the tubes fast when Novell brought them for close to a billion, they should have correctly only paid about $400 million for the company at the time they did buy them. A little Utah valley friends helping Utah valley friends out in that purchase price.

That said Novell should have been wiser in their dealing with M$, given all the back stabbing that had gone on before. I wonder what might have come of it all if Ray Noorda had not been diagnosed with Alzhemers about the same time. It had to have been affecting his decisions.

I always liked WP, much more intuitive to use than Word, and OpenOffice is only coping a lousy word processor too.

@ Ben Ruset

Ben - I rather suspect that you never had to use Word or WordPerfect on DOS. WordPerfect was an infinitely better product than Word hence the reason its market share was so high.

As for the rest of the comments blaming Novell for it's demise - you're probably spot on, it was a great shame that Word now dominates. In my opinion it still doesn't handle tables as well as WordPerfect or AmiPro - the Lotus SmartSuite wp.

For the rest of the comments blaming Novell for dragging this up again, should really read the story - at least the first paragraph! Here it is "Microsoft is asking the Supreme Court to strike-out a multi-billion dollar word processing monopoly lawsuit from Novell."

Without Hearts and Minds Control, IT is just Tool for Abuse

"What the frack are "shell extensions"? Are they hard, pointy things?"

In this particular context, they are as full of promise as any Viagran pointy thing ..... a real enough thing but only of any use when artificially supported..... and therefore of no lasting benefit.

Oh dear ....... I hope that doesn't transfer literally into the Board Room? That would be depressing.

Very little sympathy for WordPerfect, sorry

Look, I'm against MS as much as anyone else, but I have actually used and (misguidedly) tried to persuade other people to use it. The DOS text-mode version was ok. The transition to Windows was just short of a complete pile of crap.

The Windows version didn't seem to really understand such concepts as a WYSIWYG, discoverability, allowing users to develop and use common skills across applications, etc. In fact, I dare say that WP for Windows was the original case of WYSIWTF.

Such concepts as using DDE or later OLE to deal with foreign formats was also one thing that every nerd was trying to fight off back then too, and IIRC WordPerfect missed that too. Well, guess what? "OMG, embedding videos in text files is dumb" wisecracks are easy, but people actually appreciated embedding any random format of a picture or diagram without worrying about buggy converters or whether such converters exist at all.

Briefly, they had their DOS version, and tried to just port that to Windows. Badly.

Let's face it, while MS _is_ a monopolist, and should pay for any wrongs they did, you don't go from market leader to nobody in free fall, unless your product does suck by comparison.

WordPerfect had a _tremendous_ amount of mind share and brand recognition, while Word was relatively the upstart. Plus everyone already had a ton of documents in WP format, clients sending them documents in WP format, etc. People are willing to forgive a lot of minor flaws of WP or minor advantages of Word, in that kind of a situation. It's normally a slow and painful decline, if at all. To lose them hand over fist requires a major screw-up. And IMHO WordPerfect for Windows was just that: a major screw-up.

@ Ken Hagan

"There's a guy about fifteen feet from where I'm typing who does the surgery. And yes, isolation/abstraction is the key."

Does that mean you stick him in a room all by himself? ;)

WordPerfect SGML version

I remember around the time going down to Novell to look at their new version (I think it was 6.1) which had been made SGML savvy. This was word processing done right - the document was created and saved as an SGML file, with a mapping between the elements in the DTD and graphical markup. The layout and the content were truly kept apart, yet the software enabled the user to enter and edit the document via the familiar interface.

It never made it to market - Novell were too busy dropping the ball.

@ amanfromMars

"as full of promise as any Viagran pointy thing ..... a real enough thing but only of any use when artificially supported..... and therefore of no lasting benefit"

So you haven't tried the little blue pills yet?

Legal

IIRC, the original MS antitrust defence legal team all used WP, as it was a favourite tool for lawyers. I also recall that Word came in for some flak in another court case, because it couldn't produce accurate word counts, and some legal submissions have to be a certain length.

The change of fortunes for WP was very rapid - I remember when it was pre-eminent. 5.1 was wonderful...

A Time Before Windows

I was specifying software around the time that Windows 3.1 came out. The dominant word-processors were WordPerfect for clerical types and WordStar for tech-people. The spreadsheet we all used was Lotus 1,2,3. The database was dBase.

Within a very few years all of them were circling the drain, and the stuff that Microsoft had bought or glued their GUI to was dominant. I recall chats with tech support for most of these competitor companies - They all sometimes mentioned their difficulties with getting a working, stable specification out of Microsoft. By the time Windows 95 came out they were all pretty much history - This may not be a coincidence.

Dear Drum D

If WORD is such a great program for complicated documents why then do 90% of the attorneys (those folks that make complicated docs) use WP? At least in the USA.

Ain't I pleased...

I just use LaTeX (and emacs of course), but then I need to use equations a lot. Ever tried to AUTOMATICALLY number equations in MS-Word and refer to them, and have the reference AUTOMATICALLY updated if you insert new equations half-way in order to meet reviewers requirements. It may well be possible in MS-Word, but I could not find it (WP I avoided like the plague).

I actually did like MS-Word 2.0, but that was only until I learnt LaTeX, and until a colleague found out that after more than 128 equations the equation editor would not work anymore. This was a feature, not a bug according to the MS help line, After all, who needs more than 128 equations (apart from a student writing his PhD).

For God's sake

Just use TeX and output to PDF.

Seriously, TeX handles tables better than Word. And page breaks. Line breaks too, come to that. And it's easier to handle stylesheets in TeX and running headers are much more flexible and useful while indexes and cross referencing are easier. And so on... Plus it works in about 32K of RAM on every platform known to Man, and you can edit in text mode over a ssh connection on a modem if you have to. And, like I say, full PDF output has been available for at least a decade.

And you say you're still using Word? Get real!

@imposter from mars

I don't think a man from mars wrote that, because I could understand what he was writing.

WP was crap

My school's IT department were still insisting we use WP and Paradox from 1996-1998 when I was doing my IT GCSE. After much, much persuasion, the school eventually bought 2 Office licences so that the two of us that knew more than the IT teachers could actually come up with interesting VBA-based projects. When word got round at school, most of the other kids (and some parents) immediately demanded that they get to use some half-decent software, compatible with what was on their home PCs as well, and the IT department were browbeaten into dropping WP and Paradox virtually overnight.

why no dot net

There must be a reason nobody writes commerial shrink wrap software in .Net

We all have learned that Bill will move the foundation on you.

If you are building a tower, and the landlord says to move it over a foot when you are half done, will you ever get it built?

I did a lot with WP4.2. I saw a lot of companies die on win95 update.

@Tim Lewis

You seriously reckon WP for DOS was *good*?!

Yes, once you'd learnt every keyboard shortcut, it was fast to use. But hey, if you learn every keyboard shortcut for Word, that's also equally fast to use - and Word let you customise your keyboard shortcuts to match WP keyboard shortcuts. Before you'd learnt the keyboard shortcuts though, WP had a UI that was apparently borrowed from edlin and never returned. In the useability stakes, it was as close to absolute zero as makes no difference.

WFW was such a quantum leap forward from WP for DOS, it's almost impossible to describe. Suddenly you could see what you were writing, and do proper layout adjustment instead of going endlessly round the "move it a bit - preview - move it a bit more - preview" loop.

Had WPW been around sooner, it still might have made it. But WFW was on version 2 before WPW hit the streets.

WP was crap, and WPW was late. By any commercial standard, these spell disaster if your competition is even halfway competent, and MS Word has always been competent (there's a reason why Word has consistently been subsidising everything else MS do).

Oh, and re the AC saying that Word only lets you add one row/col at a time, I can only say RTFM, or try a bit harder. Go to the last row/col of your table, and guess what? you get an option to add rows/cols, where you can enter exactly how many new rows/cols you want.

There was *nothing* that could be done "quickly and efficiently" by a WP newbie.