huh?
Wordwhat?
Supremes reject Microsoft's Novell request
The Supreme Court rejected an attempt today to throw out a claim by Novell that Microsoft tried to undermine the market for Novell's WordPerfect in the mid-90s. The Supremes said Novell can go ahead and sue Microsoft under Federal anti-trust laws. Novell claims Microsoft "specifically targeted WordPerfect and other office …
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Tuesday 18th March 2008 09:01 GMT David
Good job!
Microsoft withheld (hidden) API’s for themselves and gave other organizations API’s that didn’t work with Windows as well (less memory).
So if Microsoft illegally used it’s OS to gain dominance in other areas, then this is a prime example of that.
People are often too quick to forget or are just plain ignorant of the facts.
Microsoft deserves to lose this and pay out a settlement many more times than Novell could have made from it’s office suite.
Thankfully nobody owns the Internet as a platform. At least on that platform you can create and innovate and not have anyone give you dodgy API’s because all the protocols on the Internet are open and free to use. Everybody has the same advantage.
To me, this is one more reason why innovating on Windows is a waste of time. The Internet is the platform and the future. Microsoft killed off innovation on Windows by trying to own all the software that was being built on top. How selfish was that. VCs even gave up financing ideas if they were Windows dependent. The result is that Windows is dying because of it’s lack of innovation.
In the meantime Microsoft should be held accountable for their past behavior.
http://www.weblogs.co.nz/
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Tuesday 18th March 2008 09:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
talk about a day late and a dollar short...
If memory serves correct, Microsoft started screwing Novell the moment they (MS) took aim on server class, um, services... It wasn't the fact that anything that Microsoft did anything better than Novell; from a purely technical perspective, netware was far superior any MS Server product in read/write speed, stability, recovery, etc, once you managed to separate it from ipx/spx. I was really bummed when it fell out of favor for NT. So, I really hope they bone Microsoft in court.
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Tuesday 18th March 2008 10:09 GMT Mark
Re: Wait... I'm confused...
Tim, you forget that in this deal to secure MS "IP" in Linux, MS paid more money to Novell than Novell have to pay MS. And MS's return was only a cut of the sales of SuSE Linux via coupons redeemable.
And when lawyers pointed out that if MS give away these vouchers and they are not redeemed until SuSE goes for GPL3, then MS's "IP" (if any) has been released under GPL3, MS decided not to sell them.
That scheme merely seemed to be a payment to Novell with a promise to Novell that they will scare people off Linux but those that stayed with Linux would become Novell customers. MS wanted to be able to point PHB's to this agreement and say "See! Novell agreed that we have rights in Linux and paid us for it!". Novell got cash and sold the idea that RH (who were spanking Novell in Linux) would die.
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Tuesday 18th March 2008 16:31 GMT Daniel B.
Hm...
"But Microsoft argued that because Novell did not offer a competing operating system, it could not bring action under anti-trust laws."
And NetWare is what exactly?
Sadly, I feel this antitrust lawsuit should have happened 10-15 years ago, when it actually could've turned the tide.
WordPerfect was a pretty good text editor in the good old DOS days, back in the days when I had my 286 with an monochrome ... or well, amber-letter CRT.
For truly neat stuff, I used Aldus PageMaker on my Mac Plus. I miss those days...
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
