The case for WordPerfect is resurrected in the Supreme Court

Microsoft is now resurrecting an ancient battle by asking the US Supreme Court to quash a lawsuit filed by Novell back in 2004, alleging that Microsoft maliciously ruined WordPerfect's chances in the office productivity market.

In its suit against Microsoft, Novell claims that, between 1994 and 1996, Microsoft maliciously withheld technical information about Windows 95 so as to give Microsoft Office an advantage over its rivals and to effectively squash WordPerfect and other competitors in the marketplace.

Microsoft has twice before tried to kill the lawsuit, and last week, the company tried a third time, in a formal request that the Supreme Court quash the suit. The details of that request have not been revealed.

Regardless of the merits of Novell's case now that it's the 21st century, there's plenty to show that WordPerfect was running into big problems long before its sale to Novell in 1994. And some will argue that Corel, the franchise's vendor since 1996, either cannot or isn't willing to do a lot right now about expanding its market base beyond those who seek an alternative to Microsoft Word.

It may be hard to believe this now, nearly 20 years later, but WordPerfect controlled fully half of the word processing market in 1990.

Today, WordPerfect is in second place, but a "very distant" second place, acknowledged Greg Wood, Corel's spokesperson for the word processing product.

Wood said industry surveys typically show Microsoft Word controlling about 90% of the market. "But WordPerfect has about 90% of the 10% left over," he told BetaNews.

WordPerfect also has still has some considerable usage in the consumer and small business spaces, according to Wood.

The three consecutive owners of WordPerfect -- the original WordPerfect Corp.(founded as SSI Software), then Novell, and now Corel -- have all faced marketing quandaries about how to leverage WordPerfect competitively, noted Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Associates.

WordPerfect's biggest strength today is in the legal and government markets, where long-time devotees are staying loyal, Enderle told BetaNews.

History may yet show that it was WordPerfect Corp. that committed a couple of huge gaffes, the result of which being that it failed to hold on to its product's once massive market share.

The original version was written for the Data General minicomputer, a fact which was pretty much lost to history. Selling primarily to the DOS market at first, but with adaptations soon afterward for the Apple II, Commodore Amiga, Unix, and VMS, WordPerfect was a product initially designed to sort of emulate the typewriter in software, and it was geared initially to secretaries and legal professionals who needed a reason to replace their IBM Selectric with something that had a screen and not so good a keyboard.

Ironically, it was designed and marketed to dethrone the first predominant word processor in history, WordStar. It did that handily.

Legal secretaries remain major fans of WordPerfect even today. But as it turned out, the evolution of the computer took on a very different direction than what WordPerfect, with its blank blue screen as its de facto trademark, had in mind.

"WordPerfect was supposed to replace the typewriter. Loyal customers didn't want anybody to change the product," Enderle said.

But inevitably, as the computer pretty much changed around WordPerfect or even despite of it, its function-key-centered paradigm became difficult to adapt to the then-emerging, mouse-driven paradigm of pull-down menus.

WordPerfect released the first edition of WordPerfect for Windows -- version 5.1 -- in November of 1992, several years after it was initially announced and promised. But that release suffered from some serious crashing issues.

By the time WordPerfect 5.2 came out, Microsoft Word for Windows version 2 had already been available for more than a year.

Meanwhile, like other players in word processing -- including Lotus, for instance -- WordPerfect Corp. caught on to the emerging market for office suites too late to catch up to Microsoft's early lead in that category.

Moreover, all of the early suite products were essentially amalgamations of software packages that hadn't been initially designed to work together.

"Microsoft didn't necessarily do a better job of integrating the software. But it put a better interface on things," Enderle observed.

Later on down the road, WordPerfect 7, designed for Windows 95, initially displayed bad crashing problems, too -- and it was also initially compatible with Windows NT, Microsoft's second networkable operating system that had just started gaining ground in academia and the corporate arena.

WordPerfect maintained a shaky majority of the retail market shelf sales for word processors for a while, but Microsoft then began giving discounts for Windows to manufacturers that included Word for Windows on their PCs.

Regardless of the merits of Novell's case, which will need to be decided by the Supreme Court, Corel is now up against other barriers to the growth of WordPerfect. For example, what about releasing editions of editions now for Linux and/or Apple's Mac OS X?

"We continue to keep our eyes on Linux and Macintosh, but we'd need to be able to address these markets in a profitable way," Corel's Wood told BetaNews.

Essentially, WordPerfect would be competing with free software on the Linux side, according to Enderle.

And on the Mac side, WordPerfect probably couldn't do any better than a "very distant third place" right now, since Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac already has a stronghold there.