Novell Files Antitrust Suit Vs. Microsoft
Less than a week after a collecting a $536 million settlement from Microsoft Corp. over antitrust complaints in Europe, Novell Inc. filed a lawsuit accusing the software giant of violating U.S. antitrust laws. The suit, which dovetails with the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft, claims the company used its market dominance in the mid-1990s to keep the WordPerfect word processing program and Quattro Pro spreadsheet application from gaining wider commercial acceptance.
"We intend to pursue aggressively a goal of recovering fair value for the harm caused to Novell's business by Microsoft's anticompetitive actions," said Joseph A. LaSala, Jr., Novell's senior vice president and general counsel, in a written statement Friday.
The lawsuit, filed Friday, alleges that Microsoft withheld technical information about Windows to prevent Novell from updating its software, made its operating system inhospitable to WordPerfect and other Novell programs and leveraged its own ubiquity to prevent Novell from offering its programs to customers.
Microsoft officials argue that antitrust laws don't require the company to disclose technical intricacies, and say Novell is trying to blame others for its own bad business decisions.
