Microsoft facing yet another antitrust suit

Hard to believe, but the antitrust case against Microsoft over the bundling of software into the Windows operating system has been rumbling on for nearly a decade now. But those travails are far from over. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has now approved a new antitrust case against Microsoft to move forward, this time concerning the way it leveraged its power to muscle competitors to its Microsoft Office apps out of the market in the 1990s.

It's practically ancient history now, but if you've been around computers since Windows 95 came around, you might remember that MS Word and Excel weren't always the standards they are now. Novell made two of the big powerhouses of the early '90s: WordPerfect (which fought bravely against Word for many years) and Quattro Pro (a spreadsheet app which all but vanished before the turn of the century). Both applications, believe it or not, are still on the market.

When Microsoft released its watershed Windows 95, it did something incredibly vain and illegal, at least according to Novell: It withheld some of the specifications needed to make third-party software apps work with the new OS. Win95 was an instant hit, and if you wanted to type a letter or balance your budget, you had little alternative at the time than to use MS Office. The results were swift and catastrophic for the competition: Users switched to Office in droves, quickly building a market share for Microsoft that hit 95 percent within two years.

Wacko conspiracy and sour grapes? Not really, as there's a smoking gun [PDF] in this case, a 1994 email from Bill Gates that outlines just such a plan to withhold the technical information from competitors, noting that their products were superior to Microsoft's and that, well, cheating was the only way that Microsoft could compete.

Novell first filed suit in 2004 after unloading WordPerfect and losing half a billion dollars on the deal. Four years later, a trial seems to be rolling forward, although there seems to be no way that the true damages Microsoft caused to Novell and others could possibly be repaid or even calculated, no matter what the outcome. Stay tuned for more as the story develops.