In a scene that could have , Bill Gates testified in a Salt Lake City courtroom today in a lawsuit that accuses Microsoft of — surprise! — monopolistic behavior. The accuser: former WordPerfect owner Novell.
If you’re old enough to remember Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a lame movie, before it became a hip TV show, you may also recall a promising challenger to Microsoft Word called WordPerfect, which was bought by Novell in 1994.
WordPerfect was once a powerful brand, and it still has a following in academic and legal circles thanks to its differentiating features (such as streaming codes, which are similar to HTML tags). WordPerfect even had larger market share than Word in the 1980s and early 1990s, when the operating system of choice was DOS.
Then came Windows. After its debut in 1989, Word for Windows grew quickly while WordPerfect stumbled into the party late in 1992 with a buggy version.
The release of Windows 95 sealed its fate. There wasn’t a Win 95 version of WordPerfect until May 1996, nine months after Word 95 debuted and continued to eat up market share. Novell ended up selling WordPerfect that year, to Corel, for what it says was a $1.2 billion loss.
In 2004, Novell finally cried foul. The company says WordPerfect never got a fair shot on Windows 95 since Microsoft shut it out of the development process, ostensibly in favor of Word. Novell names Gates himself, claiming he ordered Microsoft engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 application because it was too good.
Gates himself took the stand Monday to give his side of the story. While questioned by Microsoft lawyer Steven Holley, Gates said he denied the central argument of Novell’s suit — that the software giant withheld elements of Windows 95 that undermined WordPerfect.
Gates said that creating Windows 95 was the “most challenging, trying project we had ever done.” He admitted that the development team removed a technical feature of the operating system that would have supported WordPerfect, because he believed it might crash Windows. In the end, Gates argued, Novell didn’t innovate fast enough, and Word was the better product.
The numbers tend to support Gates’ argument. Stan Liebowitz of the University of Texas looked at the market share of Word vs. WordPerfect since 1986, and it clearly shows Word shooting up fast while WordPerfect sinking from its once-dominant position, starting in the early 1990s.
Would a faster (and less buggy) release on Windows 95 have turned the tide? Or at least given WordPerfect a fair shake? That’s the central question U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz will have to answer. But let us know your take in the comments.
Source http://mashable.com
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