Being a writer who focuses on the software industry, I know I’m supposed to be fascinated by the continual comings and goings of corporate lawsuits. We sue them; they sue us. Hey, let’s all just sue each other. It’s high drama that involves mistrust, lost mindshare, and unfathomable amounts of money, and is often complicated by some underlying theater — an unfaithful wife, a midnight plane ride, a profanity-strewn email — that adds an extra bit of intrigue to the story. I really should be eating this stuff up. But the truth is, I couldn’t care less. Maybe it’s the legalese, but when I try to read even a brief article about one of these corporate lawsuits, my mind wanders like Teresa Heinz Kerry delivering a preamble.

That’s why I surprised myself by making it through an entire Associated Press article about a new lawsuit between former software rivals Microsoft and Novell. I say former rivals because, regardless of what Novell would like to think, when it comes to competing with Microsoft, they haven’t even been on the map for about ten years now. I know. I used to work there.

In fact, that’s the only reason I made it through the article. I did eight years at Novell in the 1990s, and am now in my fourth year with Microsoft. So I’ve seen this thing from both sides. It’s like watching your ex-wife sue your current wife just because she happens to be richer and smarter and better looking. What’s that proverb? Hell hath no fury like a software manufacturer scorned.

So what’s got Novell in a huff this time? According to the article: “Novell said it will allege in its upcoming antitrust lawsuit that Microsoft acted illegally during the mid-1990s when its Office business software eclipsed the popularity of Novell’s WordPerfect word-processing program.”

Oh, please. Haven’t we been through all this “lawsuite” business before?

It’s no secret that WordPerfect was once the world’s best and best-selling desktop application. It took that position from WordStar in 1984, capitalized on it over the next ten years, and made billionaires out of its founders Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian. I used to drive by Bastian’s mansion every day on the way to work. Rumor had it that the computerized surveillance fence alone cost a cool three million.

While I was at Novell, however, the company made two costly mistakes. In case you’re wondering, neither one was my doing. First, citing the tremendous success of WordPerfect 5.0 and 5.1 for DOS (in the mid-late 1980s, WordPerfect owned more than half the word processing market), they refused to port the app to Windows. Inside the company, we’d heard that it would be too expensive to develop WordPerfect for Windows and the company wasn’t sure that Windows was going to win the GUI battle against OS/2. Sounds silly now, but back then it was a legitimate poll question. Considering also that Microsoft kept threatening to use something called “NT” to eat into Novell’s network market share, Novell was none to eager to port its flagship word processor to Windows. In early 1992, it finally did release WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows (to ho-hum reviews), but it had already missed the Windows 3.0 splash by almost two years.

Novell’s second mistake was trying to compete head-to-head with Microsoft in the desktop application arena. In 1995, it bundled WordPerfect with GroupWise (email and scheduling), Quattro Pro (spreadsheet), and Presentations (Novell’s “PowerPoint”) and sold it as an alternative to the wildly popular Microsoft Office Suite. So what happened? Microsoft Office sales soared and WordPerfect Office fell flat. Inside Novell, we didn’t even want to use the WordPerfect suite. It was slow and clunky. Especially Presentations. (Is that app even around anymore?) In fairness, most people at Novell, including me, did like WordPerfect better than Microsoft Word. It was what we’d learned word processing on and we were comfortable with it – even in its “windowized” form. (To this day, Microsoft has not duplicated WordPerfect’s heaven-sent Reveal Codes feature.) But Microsoft’s savvy marketing department jealously and ferociously guarded its share of the office suite pie and, soon after, Novell sold WordPerfect to Corel at a huge loss and went back to concentrating on building networking software.

A few years later, after slowly watching Novell’s stock price and employee morale dip to all-time lows, I called up a friend in Redmond and asked if Microsoft was interested in hiring an experienced but dejected technical writer. Pretty soon, I was sitting across the desk from a Microsoft manager, trying to give the right answers to his interview questions.

I must have done okay, because at the end of the interview, he asked if there was anything I wanted to ask him. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve been going to work every day for eight years trying to figure out how to beat your company. Microsoft is on my mind day and night. It’s gotten so that I can hardly concentrate on anything else. So I just want to know: Do you ever think about Novell?” He stood motionless in thought for ten full seconds before saying, without a hint of condescension, what I already knew. “No, not really.”

I accepted Microsoft’s offer the next week.