|
|
|
| Authored by: PJ on Friday, July 13 2012 @ 07:52 AM EDT |
Plus, as the article points out, no one could
avoid Microsoft at the time. If you were trying
to sell software, you were forced to deal with
them. They had 95% or so of the market.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
| |
| Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 13 2012 @ 02:24 PM EDT |
There are occasionally times where that can be part of a defense. This is one of
them.
First, a correction. The argument wouldn't have been "you should have
known..." it's "you must have known we were scumbags."
Don't forget that Novell can't make the obvious argument that Microsoft harmed
them in order to create that MS Office monopoly. Novell filed too late to put
forward that claim. The "you must have known we were scumbags"
argument would not have worked against that, but that's irrelevant because
that's not the claim here.
Novell has to make a much more convoluted argument to win. Their argument
requires them to prove a number of things. One of the things they are trying to
prove is that Novell's management was willing to do whatever was necessary to
ensure the success of WordPerfect and the associated middleware stuff in a
multi-platform basis. Yet, despite the fact that it was obvious that Microsoft
might not come through with the namespace APIs, management didn't do anything to
plan for that possibility. If they didn't bother doing that, why would we think
that they would bother doing the other difficult, costly, and non-obvious things
that would have been necessary?
One way for Novell to have overcome this problem (by demonstrating that it was
merely a matter of gullibility or wishful thinking on Novell's management's
part) would have been if Novell's management had a tentative plan for what they
would do with WordPerfect and the middleware once they were finished developing
the Windows 95 version, but they didn't.
To me, it looks like the new management were hoping WordPerfect would work out,
but weren't trying very hard to ensure that it would work out. That would have
been good enough to win the claim that Novell *can't* argue, but it's not clear
that it would be enough for what they *can* argue.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
|
|
|
|
|
