Microsoft Wins Novell’s Windows 95 Lawsuit After US Supreme Court Rejection

heard about this case was back in September 2013, with the news that Microsoft had won. But now the United States Supreme Court has decided that Microsoft did not infringe any competition rules with Windows 95, meaning we can rest this case once and for all. Novell actually started legal proceedings against Redmond back in 2004, accusing the software titan of using the operating system in question to harm its own business — the gist of the matter was that Microsoft was accused of trying to make Word more popular by removing support for WordPerfect. WordPerfect was purchased by Novell for $1.4 billion. Microsoft Word, however, quickly gained momentum back then, but Novell was seeking damages claiming that Redmond ruined its business by using its operating system monopoly to promote and popularize Word as the preferred solution of working with documents. Bill Gates jumped into the dispute in 2011, explaining that Microsoft did not actually try to slow down the integration of WordPerfect with Windows 95. Instead, the company had to tweak the operating system as WordPerfect led to Windows 95 crashing. These changes were made so that the OS could become more stable and reliable. Novell have refused to comment on this — Microsoft is suitably pleased.]]>