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| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 13 2012 @ 08:24 PM EDT |
OK, I did it. I'll admit that the part of the first opinion about Novell's
standing to sue relative to those who were harmed by Microsoft more directly
provides some insight to the subjective point of view, but the subjective point
of view was not a matter of law, anyway. There was never any question that if
Microsoft lost, Novell would win. Other than that, the decisions supports what I
have been saying.
Counts II through V were thrown out because Novell
didn't file in time for those claims. If Novell had filed earlier, it's obvious
Novell would have won. They didn't, so now they are legally hamstrung. They are
stuck with Claims I and VI, which logically depend on Novell's management being
willing to ensure that WordPerfect for other OSs was competitive with the new
Windows version of WordPerfect. If Novell's management wasn't committed enough
to WordPerfect to come up with contingency plans for WordPerfect for Windows,
why would we think they were committed enough to upgrade the other
versions?
I assume you are relying on this (quoting from the first opinion):That
is, Novell argues its
products could provide a path onto the operating-system
playing field
for an actual competitor of Windows, because a competing
operating
system, running the popular Novell software applications, would
offer
consumers an attractive alternative to Windows. That will only
work if WordPerfect on the other operating systems is good enough to compete
with WordPerfect on Windows. I'm noticing that the decision is not saying things
like "Microsoft was worried that..." so it's not clear that Microsoft paranoia
would help Novell get around that hole in their argument.
Think about
this! Since the OS monopoly is the only monopoly that matters (thanks to Novell
filing too late), by sabotaging WordPerfect on Windows, Microsoft was being
somewhat procompetitive! Microsoft kept WordPerfect on Windows from being too
much better than WordPerfect on other Operating Systems. As a result, people
were less likely to switch to Windows 95 to get the best version of
WordPerfect. That actually is an argument that Microsoft could use if they were
willing to admit how bad their behavior was. (And yes, I realize how ridiculous
that seems at first glance, but the MS Office monopoly is irrelevant thanks to
Novell filing too late to argue that point.)[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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