According to the Seattlepi, a federal judge has cleared the way for Novell to go after Microsoft regarding anti-competitive claims that Microsoft unfairly blocked out sales for Novell’s Wordperfect Office suite.
One quoted email from Aug 1997 mentioned in the above article from Microsoft group vice president Jeff Raikes to investor Warren Buffett sums the reasoning behind the judges decision nicely.
“If we own the key franchises built on top of the operating system, we dramatically widen the ‘moat’ that protects the operating system business. We hope to make a lot of money off these franchises, but even more important is that they should protect Windows royalty per PC.”
Microsoft are not having much luck in the courtroom of late, they lost a patent infringement case worth 9 million in the last week and they just settled another case with Novell for half a billion dollars for “alleged” previous transgressions. Who can guess how much they will have to pay before they realise it’s cheaper to play nice with competitors.
