03/17/2008, 12:55pm, EDT
Monday, March 17thSupreme Court denies Microsoft appeal
The US Supreme Court has denied a Microsoft appeal aimed at defeating an antitrust lawsuit, writes the Associated Press. The suit was originally launched by Novell in 2004, and accuses Microsoft of having "deliberately targeted and destroyed" WordPerfect and Quattro Pro with the purpose of preserving the monopoly of the Windows operating system. Both applications continue to be sold under the aegis of Corel, but no longer hold the marketshare they once did.
Novell argues that Microsoft was worried about the applications, which were once able to run on diverse operating systems and thus presented a lure to non-Windows platforms. Microsoft has repudiated these statements by saying that since Novell did not produce operating systems at the time, it cannot claim to have been harmed by anticompetitive behavior from Microsoft.
Replying to the new Supreme Court decision, Microsoft lawyers say that it extends antitrust laws "far beyond their intended scope."
Filed under: industry
Other story tags: Microsoft, lawsuits, antitrust, Novell
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What is Corel getting at? Are they saying M$ bundled the apps with the OS, used its marketshare to make their proprietary design and filetypes an industry standard, and then stopped making versions for other OS's which futher drove sales of WinOS?
If that's not what this article is getting at, I'm damn confused. It'd be nice if there was a leak to a site with a better-written article...
Since being purchased by Corel, it was left to languish. This was around the MacOS 8 timeframe.
Corel WordPerfect was much faster and worked well in its day - but at that time the competition was Word 6 - the worst Mac word processor ever made.
I can't wait to find out how MS destroyed Wordperfect on the Mac OS, Linux, Unix, etc. That'll be interesting. If I understand this decision correctly, all it does is allow Novell to file (or continue) an anti-trust suit against MS, but didn't actually resolve the issue (which will probably be appealed back to the Supreme court as it weaves it way through the system).
Those Mormons are amazing. They also made Crown amplifiers and recorders-- 90% rejection rate on the tape heads. And a prayer break at noon every day.
How could MS win against that? Quality will out, no matter which God you blame it on.
What a word. Eh, world.