Some charges tossed in Novell-Microsoft case

A federal judge in Baltimore has tossed out several of Novell's remaining antitrust claims against Microsoft but allowed some to go forward.

Judge J. Frederick Motz ruled on Friday that Novell can go ahead with two claims that Microsoft engaged in unfair competition with regard to Novell's WordPerfect and Quattro Pro applications. Motz ruled that the four other claims were not filled within the proper time frame.

In his decision allowing one of the two Microsoft claims to proceed, Motz cited a now infamous 1997 e-mail from Office unit head Jeff Raikes to investor Warren Buffet, in which Raikes said that applications like Word and Excel can serve as a "moat" that protects against Windows competition.

"If we own the key 'franchises' built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the 'moat' that protects the operating system business," Raikes said in the e-mail, cited in Motz's ruling. "We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, but even more important is that they should protect our Windows royalty per PC....And success in those businesses will help increase the opportunity for future pricing discretion."

Microsoft spokeswoman Stacy Drake said that the software maker is "pleased that the judge dismissed four of Novell's six claims."

A Novell representative said the company is pleased the judge allowed its case to continue and that Novell looks forward to going to trial on the matter.

Novell sued Microsoft over WordPerfect in November 2004, days after reaching a $536 million settlement on other antitrust claims related to Novell's NetWare operating system. Novell also dropped out of the European Union's antitrust case against Microsoft following the settlement.

Historical Lessons!

Now that Microsoft has decided to embrace the open-standards XML technologies for it future office productivity applications should one now be concerned about this company imposing anti-competitive pressures on Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) or Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Perhaps, when these cases do eventually move forward in court it would be good if a company such as IBM would be called to give evidence against Microsoft (like it did in the landmark case involving the Windows Operating System a few years ago) as to how Microsoft imposed anti-competitive pressure against its own "Lotus SmartSuite Office Productivity Suite"!

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WordPerfect victim of it's own hubris

The DOS version was so successful that the owners didn't take the need to make a Windows version seriously until it was too late. When they finally did come out with a Windows version they rushed it so badly it was nicknamed WordDefect. They lost a couple years of development time simply because they thought the DOS version was good enough.

I'm one person who ponied up $500+ for a copy of WordPerfect (DOS) and was busily trying to learn all it's obscure keystroke combinations when I went to a MS seminar and won a copy of MS Word for Windows as a door prize. I spent a couple hours trying out MS Word and never wasted another minute on WP because it was clear that WP was doomed.

[System Tyrant]

WordPerfect Today.

Have you tried WordPerfect 12? Having gone from 5.1 to 8 then to 11 and on to 12 I can say 12 has been the best release since 5.1. That is saying a lot because I believe it is better than any of the Microsoft Office versions. Licencing is much better too.