Bill Gates Testifies in Novell Lawsuit Today

Today, Bill Gates should take the stand in a suit that Novell has filled against Microsoft in the court of law back in 2004.

The suit claims that Microsoft has been applying anti-competitive tactics that hurt two products from Novell, namely WordPerfect and Quattro Pro.

The pair was supposed to make it to computers running under Microsoft's Windows 95 platform, but they were rejected by the Redmond-based company.

According to Microsoft, both products were unstable, and it decided to work against having them on its operating system, although it seems that the company was actually eliminating them fearing they might hurt its own Microsoft Office products.

According to Novell, Microsoft promised support for the two applications, but held back key technical information that would have made them compatible with the Windows 95 platform.

Novell filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Salt Lake City and claims $1.2 billion in damages, as Cnet explains in a recent article.

The company says that Microsoft's actions have made WordPerfect and Quattro Pro lose important share on the market. Microsoft, however, dismissed the claims and asked the court to drop the case.

Both products have been sold to Corel in 1996 for far less than the over $1 billion that it paid for them in the first place.

The Novell versus Microsoft antitrust case filed in 2004 has been in various courts so far, and has finally landed in the federal court in Salt Lake City.

U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz is now hearing it, although he dismissed it a while ago. The hearing started several weeks ago.

Novell brought to court emails from Bill Gates to his software development teams, claiming that Microsoft was looking into delaying the launch of Windows 95 so as to prevent the aforementioned WordPerfect and Quattro Pro apps from gaining market share.