You have nailed Judge Motz's analysis to a 't'. You restate it well in this
portion:
The only way to demonstrate that is if it could be
shown that those same advanced features (I won't warn you again!) were made
available by the WordPerfect suite on another platform in order that the
middleware advantage was provided and the Windows 95 features were less of a
barrier to using alternative operating systems. At the very least, there needed
to be a product plan to take this advantage.
The problem is the
"another platform" red herring. WordPerfect is the other platform. That's
the one that Novell wanted developers developing for, as they had done in the
past. (For many users, WordPerfect was their OS; they didn't know anything about
the DOS prompt, except how to start WP.)
WordPerfect had the potential to
become a platform for applications ON WIN95, which also had the potential to
then move on other OSes other than Windows95, taking those apps (and their
users) with it, creating another playing field. The fact that MS killed the
possibility before it was sufficiently realized to come to market is proof of
anti-competitiveness, not exculpatory evidence.
Follow the Judge's
argument to its logical conclusion. The only way to demonstrate that WordPerfect
has been prevented from lessening the applications barrier to entry is for it to
succeed in lessening the applications barrier to entry via another platform, in
which case, there was no harm, no foul. Voila - anticompetitive harm just became
a logical impossibility!
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