Bill Gates tells federal jury Novell's WordPerfect would have crashed PCs

Testifying before a federal jury in Salt Lake City yesterday, Microsoft chairman Bill Gates said his company dumped the once popular WordPerfect word processing application, while rolling out Windows 95 as it was not compatible to the new operating system.

Gates said Microsoft's own Word program had been ranked number one in 1994, above WordPerfect, and he had to make a trade-off between the two while introducing Windows 95. He feared that the operating system would crash if it continued with a technical feature to support WordPerfect.

The Microsoft chairman was the opening defence witness for his company, which is facing a $1 billion anti-trust lawsuit filed by Novell Inc, the Utah-based former owner of WordPerfect.

Novell sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming it violated American anti-trust laws when it launched Windows 95. Novell claims it was forced to sell WordPerfect for a loss of $1.2 billion after Microsoft dumped it.

Novell bought WordPerfect and spreadsheet Quattro Pro – which were then considered to be the best word processing and spreadsheet programs – in 1994, hoping it would feature on Windows 95. Microsoft had also been enthusiastically promoting the two programs, claims Novell.

Novell accuses Gates of ordering his engineers to reject WordPerfect as a Windows 95 word processing application, as he feared it was better than MS Word.