Now that Novell has all of that M$ money I hope that they do what they said that they would like to..

But WP back and open source it....

I hope that they come back with a full Linux version....

I miss Quattro Pro and my son loved Presentations...

I one bought a copy of M$ Word and it really sucked...

But thank GOD for openoffice....

MarkP

For what it's worth, I was a die-hard WP user when 4.2 was around, and even a little bit when 5.0 and 5.1 was new. This was in my senior year of high school.

The computer lab at school had MS Word on it - the "brand new" version which I think was 2.0. It sucked big time and I refused to use it.

Sometime later, I think when Windows/Office 95 came out, I ran across Word again and used it to make a quick document. WYSIWYG was new to me, and I actually liked using it.

Also at that time, WP came out with 6.0 which was horrendous. It was slow, uninteresting to look at, hard to use, bulky, and had too many bugs to deal with.

Needless to say, soon after I switched from being a WP snob to a Word snob.

MS has a documented history of forcing business partners to nullify contracts with companies that make products that could compete with Microsoft's. This is a huge problem, and very easily could lead to the death of a product. Using their contracts with IBM as an example, if MS demands that IBM no longer sell PCs with WordPerfect as the word processor, and threaten to yank all Windows licenses if they do not comply, two things happen: 1. IBM drops WordPerfect out of necessity, given that 95% of desktops run Windows and that IBM cannot sell a PC without it, and 2. Wordperfect dies a quick death. If losing a contract with IBM, which would have guaranteed hundreds of thousands of sales, is not enough, then they die as the same MS strong-arm techniques are applied to other PC manufacturers like Sony, Compaq, HP, Gateway, etc.
The net result? Wordperfect heavily declines by being illegally muscled out of its main business. Then, with no fresh capital, it cannot integrate newer and more innovative features that consumers demand, and eventually dies from being unable to compete. In the end, Microsoft blames a poor product, while in reality illegal and anticompetitive business practices killed it long before.
When will the US government impose a worthwhile and equitable penalty that actually means something to a company with nearly 50 BILLION in cash saved up?

In the early days of the IBM PC clone market, there were over 20 word processor vendors. To help consumers pick a choice, the computer magazines at the time (Personal Computer World) would display check box charts displaying all the features that each word processor had (or did not have). This constant pressure led to many of the companies to merge in order to combine features. Eventually, the word processor market was reduced to a handful of companies. Microsoft did their usual thing of constantly adding new features at a rate that no-one else could compete against.

At the time that Novell took over the Wordperfect line, it was a vastly superior product in comparison to Word. WP was very consistent and reacted to various situations with expected behavior...bulleted lists, numbered lists, indentation. It was so much better than Word that is was the de facto word processor of choice for both the legal and medical industries for years to come...mainly because legal and medical documents demanded predictable formatting. Even today I find Word autoformatting in weird or unexpected ways...

I worked for WordPerfect as a Software Tester (Software Quality Engineer) between 1992 and 1994 so I have first-hand knowledge of how slimy Microsoft's competitive tactics were. When I started working at WP, they owned over 90% of the PC Word Processing market. MS set their sights on them and stooped to all kinds of levels to rub them out of the market.

The first few versions of WordPerfect for Windows were by default crippled because Microsoft kept the (important) Windows APIs undocumented. Any new features that WordPerfect was working on behind closed doors were somehow stolen and announced in a press release by MS the day before WP had scheduled a press release to announce them. There were half a dozen employees in the marketing department and even development that were found to be on MS payroll and ended up getting fired.
Microsoft is one of the most unethical companies I know of. Their tactics should land them in the corporate malfeasance hall of fame along with the likes of Enron, but instead, they are worshipped as the darling of Wall Street.
As one of many former WordPerfect engineers who was sad to see such a great company get rubbed out of the market, I can tell you first hand that MS Word would be a much better program right now if it had any legitimate competitors.

For a "mere" $536 million in cash Novell agreed to drop out of the European Commission's case against Microsoft where it has been one of the five primary complainants, and to abandoning any attempt to sue Microsoft on antitrust grounds - how come then MS went along with exclusing WordPerfect and Quattro Pro fom that settlement? Couldn't it have just added a couple of hundred mil? Does this mean Novell reckons the WP/QP case is worth, say, a billion?