Authors: GGarza

Posted on Windows 7 News & Tips

Novell, once the networking giant, and competitor to Microsoft is suing Microsoft for $1 billion. According to Novell Microsoft violated anti-trust laws by not providing advanced software to Novell.

Novell at that time was the owner of WordPerfect, a document processing program and precursor to Microsoft’s own word processing office product called Word. Novell had supposedly made arrangements with Microsoft to allow WordPerfect to run on Windows 95. At first Microsoft agreed to the arrangement. But Microsoft rejected WordPerfect as a Windows 95 program. Consequently, Microsoft was able to market it’s own Office product brand, which included its own word processor.

Microsoft claims that after the WordPerfect product was installed on a Windows 95 PC, it caused the operating system to crash. Novell became aware of the problem but did not or could not fix it in time.

One of the complaints against Microsoft is that Novell had asked for a copy of the Windows 95 OS so it could modify its word processor to comply with Windows 95 OS standards, but Microsoft would not provide that product. After that, when Microsoft released Windows 95, Word perfect’s market share dropped from 50% to 10%. At the same time, the MS Office suite began to take hold of the market and it has not relinquished market control since that time.

Novell has conceded that Microsoft was under no legal obligation to provide access to the source code for Windows 95. However, Microsoft had enticed Novell to prepare a working version of Wordperfect, only to have Microsoft reject that version when it became clear that Microsoft had its own word processing suite already in development.

Another problem with Novell’s case is that there is no real evidence to support Novell’s contention. Apparently, there are no documents, and no other evidence, like testimony of Novell or Microsoft officials.

Even the judge in the case has some doubts about Novell’s claims, saying at one point, “I don’t see why I have to give a product to a competitor so he can beat me.”

Source: Appnews

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