Gates: Novell are sore losers, Word trounced WordPerfect

Does anyone have any insight on which DLLs and APIs we're talking about here? This sounds like a suspiciously bad excuse from Novell's part.

What magical functions could have been the sole reason a program as complex and extensive as a word processor and as famous and widespread as WP failed?

Eh?

(he) testified that the Windows team dumped a technical feature that would have supported WordPerfect because he was worried it might crash the operating system.

So what about all the other technical features that DID crash Windows 95, was he worried about them?

Ahh the happy days spent curing .dll hell, the registry, and trying to figure out what the BSoD ment

WP was King

I used Word Perfect from DOS days through Windows 3.1, 3.11 and 95 in the admin jobs I had at the time. I absolutely loved the script writing ability of WP - you could simply and quickly write mini-programs to deal with fiddly tasks such as filling in fields to print on pre-formatted form paper instead of writing it out by hand.

I worked for the Housing Commission (public housing provider) where we had to manually write out an initial five rent deposit slips for the new tenant to use until their printed book arrived. There were six fields to complete on each slip - name, address, account number, reference number, and a couple of others i can't recall. The fields were small, so it was a time consuming, diabolical tasks to do 30 times a day x 5. Then I wrote a WP script (took me about 20 minutes to write it and get it working perfectly) which allowed staff to type the info up in 20 seconds to have 10 slips printed in about the same time, down from the 5+ minutes to hand print 5 slips and eliminating the hand cramps everyone complained about. That was the power of Word Perfect.

Word Perfect was a better program. It was a more powerful program and as noted by someone else, had a reveal codes function which actually revealed all the hidden stuff, allowing you to quickly identify and remove unnecessary formatting codes that were causing a document to not preview as expected.

I currently use Pages and occasionally MS Word 11 but if Correll released a new version of Word Perfect for Mac, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

"It was a ground-breaking piece of work... ..."

I thought he was supposed to be giving evidence, not a marketing presentation.

I suppose he doesn't know the difference.

From the Groklaw PDF an MS strategy begins to emerge.

Identify key apps that would encourage users to migrate to other OS's *if* they moved.

Encourage them *not* to move.

Sucker them into using "selected" API's

Dump the API pre-launch crippling the competition and leaving the way clear for your products (whose developers were warned these API's are "provisional" wink, wink).

Obviously if you're the sort of corporate sociopath for whom words like "fairness", "legal", and "competitive" are just words this routine won't bother you in the slightest. MS's past behavior suggests they have managers who fit that description quite well.

While MS *might* be less inclined to do this today that probably owes more to the fact there are fewer market niches that they don't control the #1 player in on windows and so fear what would happen if *that* player moved to another OS *possibly* taking their user base with them.

Moral of this story. If you compete with MS in *any* market, even one they would *like* to be in and your software depends on windows APIs in *any* way keep your documentation up to date (and retain older copies to see what has been air brushed out) and don't hesitate to fire up a debugger (preferably *not* the MS debugger) if anything starts acting odd.

MS moved into ERP a while ago.

I'd suggest Oracle and SAP better watch out for any "surprise" API changes which just happen to kneecap their products under Windows.

Microsoft "worked super-hard" on Word?

Yeah, they worked "super-hard" ... by poaching Charles Simonyi and Richard Brodie from Xerox, to "rewrite" Xerox Bravo, the first GUI word processor, then rebrand it as Microsoft's "innovation".

Then they worked "super-hard" to break cross-platform software, by releasing deliberately broken APIs, whilst using undocumented APIs for their own software, just like they did with Novell, Netscape, Real Networks and anyone else who dared to support anything but just Windows.

Both the DOJ and the EU Commission have already exposed Microsoft's criminal business methods in great detail, producing swath of court evidence, most of which originates from within Microsoft, so why does this even need to go to trial again? It should be an open and shut case.

Here's a good summary:

http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf

What I don't understand about this is....

... that I was using Wordperfect 5.2 for Windows back in 1992/93 on Windows 3.1/3.11. Well, when I say using I mean cursing and swearing a lot at the endless stream of GPF's. In short, it sucked well before Windows 95 was on the scene.

So, I switched to Word 2.0 then upgraded to 6.0.

By the time of Windows 95 general release nearly everyone had been through 3 years of Wordperfect sucking so badly that they all did the same thing and switched. I was working in the channel at the time and the number of Word crossgrade licenses we sold was staggering.

Odd thing is, other large companies like Lotus and Borland had no issues writing reliable software for 16 bit and (later) 32 bit Windows. Only WordPerfect sticks in my memory as having this issue.

This is like Corel trying to blame Microsoft for Corel Draw 4 being a big stinking pile of shite; I believe the reality is that either the programmers just weren't good enough, testing not through enough or the marketing teams were too dominant. I suspect all three.

If MS really did that.....

The PAs in the organisation I worked for in the early 90s tested WP and Word and unanimously determined WP to be the better application. As an amateur user, I found it much more intuitive, and the ability to see all the hidden commands in any document was a godsend compared to my kids' use of Word at home when, for example, we had to delete work and start again because the reasons underlying any incorrect formatting were just impossible to determine and fix

I can also remember sitting in my office at 03.00, using the Windows version of WP, 6.0 if I recall correctly, to work on what was a crucial document, and having to save it every time I changed just a single character, in case it might crash. I also remember my own PA in floods of tears trying to work with that version

If the problems we encountered then were really due to MS deliberately misleading the WP developers, regardless of how wrong it would undoubtedly be to do so, and while I would never advocate this as a course of action, as one who suffered from the consequences. I would find it very hard to shed any tears if someone took those responsible, lined them up on the edge of the Grand Canyon, and pushed them off

Paris, because at least she sucks honourably

No need to get mad, just get even

Simple! Open Source WP and give it away. That'll screw Billy Boy over. Worked for Netscape!