Microsoft News Tracker

Sometimes Microsoft and Novell are the best of pals, and sometimes they’re not as was demonstrated today when a US Federal appeals court let 2 of 6 claims in Novell’s antitrust suit against Microsoft continue to trial. These particular antitrust claims are related to Novell’s allegation that “Microsoft used its monopoly power to limit sales of WordPerfect, a word-processing program, and Quattro Pro, a spreadsheet program.”

In practice, this means that Novell believes that Microsoft used its OS monopoly to keep PC manufacturers from preinstalling the then Novell products on their PCs. They aren’t Novell products any longer since they were sold to Corel in 1996 which adds an archaeological air to the whole proceeding, but the mills of the courts grind slowly.