Litigation: customers take a backseat

First there were the look-and-feel lawsuits initiated by Lotus against Paperback Software International and Mosaic, two low-cost makers of Lotus 1-2-3 clones, and eventually Borland. In Lotus vs. Paperback Software, the court held that Paperback infringed on Lotus' copyright because its spreadsheet contained not just functional elements similar to Lotus 1-2-3, but aesthetic qualities as well. These suits pounded the small players into the ground.

But this early squashing of surrounding rivals by taking them to court turned into a competitive strategy of sorts. Apple filed its own look-and-feel lawsuit against Microsoft in 1988, with the claim that Microsoft had copied the gestalt of the Macintosh user interface. Although Apple failed to prove the "virtually identical copying" of its interface for Windows, it eventually was revealed that Apple had given Microsoft some license in an effort to get Microsoft to write applications for the Macintosh.

Then, in the early 1990s, scientist Roger Billings claimed he invented the client/server distributed-computing concept and had the patent to prove it. He collected $125,000 from a large NetWare customer and attempted to sue Novell for patent infringement and $220 million -- an 8-percent royalty from total NetWare sales at the time. Since that time, a number of lawsuits tied to the copy, infringement, or imitation of intellectual properties, with the intent to squash or profit from innovations, have flooded the courts.

But perhaps the most tiresome and industry-draining of lawsuits involves cries of monopoly. From 1969 until 1982, IBM was challenged by antitrust law, forever changing the company and the industry. Even though the courts dropped the case in 1982, the fight drained the company and caused a corporate shift in strategy. Yet the lawsuits also spawned a software industry in the wake of proprietary unbundling.

Now the Department of Justice has put another powerful industry leader, Microsoft, under the antitrust microscope. The challenge now is to determine whether Microsoft illegally leveraged its Windows dominance to force Internet Explorer down PC vendors' throats. And with Netscape, Oracle, and Sun breathing down Microsoft's neck with charges of stumping Java and seizing the Internet's reins, who knows where this legal trip will take us.