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  (Source: brightsideofnews.com)
The jury vote was 11-1 in favor of Novell

Former WordPerfect owner Novell lost out on as much as $1.3 billion last week when jurors involved in its antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft had deadlocked after much deliberation.

Novell sued Microsoft in 2004 claiming that the Windows maker had manipulated its Windows 95 operating system to be incompatible with Novell's WordPerfect and Quattro Pro programs in an effort to boost its own version of the programs. Microsoft allegedly restricted outside programmers from accessing programming code needed to run Novell's software correctly.

Novell sought a maximum of $1.3 billion in damages. According to Novell, WordPerfect's share of the word-processing market dropped from 50 percent in 1990 to less than 10 percent in 1996. Also, its value fell from $1.2 billion in 1994 to $170 million in 1996.

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz originally dismissed Novell’s lawsuit against Microsoft, but the U.S. Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia reinstated it.

The trial, which began October 18, ended last week after a 12-member jury panel was unable to reach a unanimous verdict. They deliberated for three days, and Motz then dismissed them. The jury vote was 11-1 in favor of Novell.

According to reports, there was one juror that had an especially difficult time, and stuck to his guns in favor of Microsoft. Motz asked both Microsoft and Novell lawyers if they'd accept anything other than a unanimous vote, and Microsoft's lawyers declined.

"We are disappointed," said Jim Jardine, a Microsoft attorney. "We hoped to get a verdict. But we are confident. This jury was a very diligent jury, and there are other steps that we can do to move forward."

According to Jim Lundberg, Novell's attorney, Novell will likely seek a retrial.

"We are hoping that in retrial, although it is technically complicated, that we can convince a jury that Novell's claims are valid," said Lundberg.

Sources: Huffington Post, BusinessWeek


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Microsoft should win
By dgingerich on 12/19/2011 10:50:17 AM , Rating: 1
I used both Word and Wordperfect back in that era. Wordperfect was a difficult to use, (it had its own printer drivers, and if your printer wasn't included, good luck trying to get emulation to work) buggy, (crashed at the drop of a hat, especially when printing) and bloated (a Win95 machine with 6MB of memory would be able to handle 3 documents at most, while Word could handle 15-20) just as Bill Gates said. The one guy that held out was right. He was probably the only one on the jury who had any sense.




RE: Microsoft should win
By Visual on 12/19/2011 11:10:03 AM , Rating: 2
Not having used WordPerfect, I am still with you on this one. The very idea that MS could make windows incompatible to a program on purpose is technically absurd. Win95 ran 16-bit Win 3.11 programs quite OK, didn't Novell have such a version?

And why on earth should this matter be decided by some random jury anyway? If you pick the jurors normally, I am sure almost none of them would have the technical knowledge to understand the claim, or any of the presented evidence. Their decision would be entirely based on "I don't like MS".

And speaking of evidence, is there actually any? Where can I see some more technical details about what exactly was the incompatibility? Not that it matters much, as when you get down to it, Win95 was exactly the same for all developers and if others didn't complain then neither should Novell. But I'm still curious.


RE: Microsoft should win
By bug77 on 12/19/2011 11:22:55 AM , Rating: 3
quote:
And speaking of evidence, is there actually any?


I think that's the real issue: if MS decides to use undocumented API in their products, 3rd parties are not even allowed to reverse engineer them to get the proof MS is not playing fair. Just ask Stack Electronics.


RE: Microsoft should win
By Samus on 12/19/11, Rating: 0
RE: Microsoft should win
By dgingerich on 12/19/2011 2:19:20 PM , Rating: 5
What's obvious to me is that the programmers behind Wordperfect, whichever company they were under, never put forward effort into properly programming Windows applications. The tools were out there: Visual C++, Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. They were out from before WP 6.0 came out. WP6.0 was even written with Visual C++. The testing was short, to try to get it to market, leading to bugs that should have been caught. They decided to use DOS printing instead of the Windows printing stack, creating huge problems. They put in all kinds of fancy stuff for formatting and pictures, making it big. They put in a "WYSIWYG" interface without using the standard Windows interface commands, causing it to render the whole program twice, causing it to become HUGE in memory. They didn't correct any of these problems with 6.1 or 7.0. They continued to do it their way instead of the best way. They figured they knew better, which they didn't. They even had the audacity to replace over 20 (depending on options and printers installed, anywhere from 21 to 37) Windows 3.1 or 95 systems files with their own version, causing all kinds of problems with other programs. That's why they failed: their own arrogance.

Sure, MS probably used a version of Visual C++ they had internally to produce Office 2.0. They may have had a leg up. They certainly did not make it specifically incompatible with WP. That would have made huge problems with many other, fully successful programs on the market.

Lotus 1-2-3 worked beautifully. Of course, they used the IBM Visual C++ package to do it, which compiled to standard Windows interface commands and libraries. They also used the standard Windows printing stack, handing a prerendered image to the printer driver for printing. They did it right.

To blame MS for the problems with other programs, like so many other laymen in the world back then and even now, for program instability is asinine and voluntarily ignorant.


RE: Microsoft should win
By Cypherdude1 on 12/19/2011 2:28:29 PM , Rating: 1
quote:
4) WordPerfect 7 for Windows 95, was released a year AFTER Windows 95 due to long beta-testing, and still suffered from stability problems and the famous missing "Designed for Windows" logo.
That's strange because I had WordPerfect 7 installed in Win95a in February 1997. After applying a couple of patches (over the course of a few months), I never really had any problems with WP7. In fact, WP7 was a modern, easy to use, stable word processor. WP7 was far easier to include graphic images than Word. I kept all my applications intact while upgrading to Windows 98 and later 98SE. That is now my old dual-boot system and all my applications still work correctly. The other, fully separate, boot O/S is WinXP SP3 Pro and I have WP12 installed. My current system is Win7 Pro 64. While I have both Word 2010 and WP X5 installed, I never use Word. I always use WP X5. WP's interface has hardly changed at all, it's fully customizable, and I still like it better than Word.

I guess you had to be sort of a computer expert to keep WP7, Win95a, Win98, and Win98SE from crashing. You had to find and apply the WP7 patches and Windows tweaks to make them stable. From 1997 to 2001, I even upgraded motherboards 3 times (VX-PCI+Cyrix 6x86-P150, Microstar 5169+AMD K6-2 350 & Abit KG7-RAID+AMD T-Bird 1400) without reinstalling. ;^D


RE: Microsoft should win
By Solandri on 12/19/2011 2:39:00 PM , Rating: 4
quote:
I think that's the real issue: if MS decides to use undocumented API in their products, 3rd parties are not even allowed to reverse engineer them to get the proof MS is not playing fair.

This was normal practice at Microsoft before the monopoly lawsuits. People who've interned there (i.e. no vested interest in the company) told me if their app needed to do something which was difficult with the regular Windows API, they could put in a request to get something undocumented added. An avenue not open to 3rd party developers. From a technical standpoint it's an obvious thing to do (which is probably why they did it). But from a competitive standpoint, it opens a can of worms when your OS holds >90% of the market.

That was the whole crux of the issue, not whether Word or WordPerfect was the better program. DOS was relatively open, in that it gave the program complete control of the computer. Windows required the program to funnel its UI and appearance through the Windows API. That added control put Microsoft in a conflict of interest when it was simultaneously developing both Windows and Windows apps. This whole trial is about whether Microsoft abused that control to the detriment of its competitors in app-space.

Also, one of the reasons WP for Windows was so late and bad was because Microsoft pulled a switcheroo on the industry. They made a big deal about contracting with IBM to create OS/2 as the GUI for PCs. Most other software companies were busy porting their DOS apps to OS/2. Microsoft was semi-secretly working on Windows all the while. They gradually phased out all development support for OS/2, but hey! lookie here, we have this neat shiny product called Windows which does mostly the same thing, and we've already made a GUI word processor and spreadsheet app for it. Other software companies had to scrap their OS/2 development and start over on Windows versions.

To be fair, there were blunders on WordPerfect and Lotus' part too. WP in particular tried to stick with DOS as long as it could (the reason WP cornered the word processor market was because millions of secretaries had memorized WP's keyboard shortcuts and macros, so a menu-driven GUI breaks that makes keyboard shortcuts less important was bad for WP). But the way Microsoft orchestrated the whole thing stank to high heaven at the time.


RE: Microsoft should win
By BZDTemp on 12/19/11, Rating: -1
RE: Microsoft should win
By BZDTemp on 12/20/2011 3:02:56 AM , Rating: 2
And that I get voted down for?!

The truth is certainly ill heard.


RE: Microsoft should win
By polishvendetta on 12/20/2011 9:30:55 AM , Rating: 2
Do you have any idea how many lines of code it would take in Windows to make sure that WP ran badly in Win95? How many checks there would have to me to see if the user had 1 single progrm installed? How many conditions would have to be checked for every time you clicked on an icon?

Microsoft may have enhanced the performance of Word, or any number of their other programs. But its absolutely silly to think that there is something in Win95 or any version of Windows that makes WP have issues.


RE: Microsoft should win
By ShaolinSoccer on 12/19/2011 7:53:26 PM , Rating: 2
quote:
If you pick the jurors normally, I am sure almost none of them would have the technical knowledge to understand the claim, or any of the presented evidence.


That's what good lawyers are for...


RE: Microsoft should win
By borismkv on 12/19/11, Rating: 0
RE: Microsoft should win
By dgingerich on 12/19/2011 2:30:23 PM , Rating: 3
My first certification, and what got me started in my IT support career, was a Certified Novell Administrator for Netware 4.1. It was horrid, but it was the main storage server OS of the day. Microsoft came in and took over with Windows Server because it was so much better. Every release of Windows Server keeps getting better and better, unlike the desktop OS. Microsoft is dominating the server OS market now because they do a good job.

Sure, you can do many of the things Windows Server could do with Linux, (and I do as part of my job) but Windows takes 1/10 the time and 1/20 the effort. It is SO much better. I've worked with HP-UX, AIX, Irix, RHEL, and SLES, and they don't even come close to the refined ease of Windows, and Windows even wins the security and stability tests these days.

Microsoft is ahead because they do things RIGHT. It really irks me when people blame MS for a program having issues. The fault lies, 99% of the time, with the outside program, not with Windows.


RE: Microsoft should win
By Justin Time on 12/19/2011 3:40:33 PM , Rating: 2
I used the Windows version of Wordperfect and the first WinWord - there was no competition. Wordperfect simply tried to implement a Win-API version of their DOS app, instead of starting with a clean sheet to use the Windows paradigm. Their concept was based around capturing users of their DOS app, and making the windows version as much of an emulation as possible... totally the wrong approach - it sucked.


RE: Microsoft should win
By Tanclearas on 12/19/2011 4:07:31 PM , Rating: 2
Many of your arguments could actually be used to strengthen Novell's position, not weaken it. Novell is arguing that Microsoft was at an unfair advantage to ensure that its software did work better than competitors.


Win95?
By retrospooty on 12/19/2011 10:20:49 AM , Rating: 2
Swift justice if I have ever seen it. Hopefully they get this sorted out before the 2024 olympics.




RE: Win95?
By BSMonitor on 12/19/11, Rating: -1
RE: Win95?
By voodoochile123 on 12/20/11, Rating: 0
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