[odf-discuss] Microsoft and Novell cooperate on document formats

[Nicu Buculei]

marbux wrote:
> 
> Sorry, but I've been a Novell watcher for years. They dumped WordPerfect 
> because of the "cultural clash." They dead-ended a bunch of other really 
> good WordPerfect Corp. tools (e.g., DataPerfect and WordPerfect Shell)  
> and managed to run Groupwise into the ground despite product 
> superiority. The company has never understood the market for office 
> productivity software and  I'd be really intrigued if you were to 
> describe how they suddenly acquired that understanding and expertise.

But Novell acquired Ximian in 2003

> Yes, there are still quite a few ex-WordPerfect Corp. staffers in the 
> Provo area, but they've been located in new jobs for years now. Corel 
> pink-slipped the last of them in 1998. And there's still a fair bit of 
> bad blood between them and Novell, which has never been forgiven for 
> selling WordPerfect to Corel and scrapping most of the other software 
> WordPerfect Corp. developed.

You will see that Novell people working on OOo are either former Ximian 
people or from their Bangalore team, not ex-WordPerfect.

> Major software projects require more than just throwing money and 
> developers at them, particularly for high end office software. It 
> requires expertise not only in programming but also in office procedure 
> and workflows. It isn't something that can be picked up overnight or 
> even in a couple of years. WordPerfect is a good example; it hasn't seen 
> a major feature added since the WordPerfect Corp. developers were laid 
> off by Corel.

Ximian started working on OOo on their own, before being acquired by Novell.

-- 
nicu
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