DevBlog

Last week, Novell filed another lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft was at fault for the failure of WordImperfect, a product Novell owned at one time. This suit is total crap. Microsoft had nothing to do with the demise of WordImperfect, but had everything to do with former Novell head honcho Ray Noorda. I've blogged about his tactics before, but a refresher with a WordImperfect slant may be helpful.

While Noorda ran Novell, he insisted on fighting Microsoft on everything he could. He purchased DR-DOS to compete against MS-DOS and then tried to sue when DR-DOS wouldn't do Windows. After Noorda left Novell, he formed Caldera (now SCO) and bought DR-DOS from Novell. He then sued Microsoft again over DR-DOS, claiming that Microsoft was stopping DR-DOS from making inroads into embedded systems. We're probably familiar with SCO's current lawsuits regarding Linux. There are other suits that Noorda's companies have filed against Microsoft.

So, it seems that Noorda's standard way of doing business is to sue. Now, I'm not claiming that Microsoft has kept it's nose clean. We know about the DOJ settlement and the ongoing case in the EU.

But, let's get back to the Novell case. Under Noorda's watch, Novell bought WordImperfect for something like $3 billion. Years later, it was sold to Corel for something like $300 million. Noorda is no longer there, but apparently his legacy and management style live on. Early last week, it was announced that Novell and Microsoft had settled another case regarding networking. That may have given Novell some incentive to file this new case. Again, a case without merit.

Those of you that have known me a long time know that I have never liked WordImperfect. Having to reveal codes to do the simplest editing drove me nuts. And who would ever think of pressing F3 twice to bring up help. The Windows version was a disaster. Anyone that tried to use it (and I worked at a company where it was the corporate standad) knows that WordImperfect 6 was almost impossible to use. This was at the time people were really starting to move from DOS to Windows 3.11. When their word processor of choice didn't work, they looked for one that did. That was Microsoft Word. I personally preferred Ami Pro.

So, what kinds of arguements can we expect from Novell? I suspect one thing will be a statement said to me by an old friend who was on the WordImperfect development team. He said (and I have no reason to doubt it was the corporate opinion) that Microsoft had been pushing OS/2 development, but secretly developing Windows NT. When Microsoft dropped OS/2 in favor of NT, it left WordImperfect holding the bag and a long way behind the development curve compared to Microsoft Word. I've read the history of OS/2 and NT and personally don't buy into this arguement.

The generaly concensus that I've seen on the blogs is that Novell doesn't have a chance in this case. It will certainly be interesting to see what happens.