"Gatt" wrote in message
...

"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
.. .

It was purchased and destroyed.

Actually, the competition improved, but WordPerfect did not.

You're an idiot.

I was a contractor at Netscape when IE4.0 came out. Basically, it looked
just like somebody stole the internal alpha copy of Netscape Communicator.

(After Internet Exploder's release party in San Francisco, they dropped a
giant blue paper-mache-and-chickenwire "e" on the front lawn of Netscape.
Which would add trespassing and littering to theft, except that by noon
the 7' Netscape lizard, "Mozilla" was standing on the yard among the
smashed remains of the Microsoft "e".)

In Netscape's case, the competition didn't "improve." They stole
proprietary code and used massive personnel resources to get it to market
before the smaller company. I wouldn't expect people in Europe to
understand how that sort of thing happened in terms of web browsers, word
processors, spreadsheets and other "Microsoft products" that bear striking
resemblances to former competitors.

Gatt,

Maybe you could verify something for me: I've heard for some time that,
though MS is quick to prosecute piracy and reverse engineering MS stuff,
they expend copious amounts of money reverse engineering competitors
products.

True or trash?