I don't know why, but over the last year readers have several times brought up a topic that is a something of an historic gripe - actually, in terms of the technology world, one that is ancient history. Why did WordPerfect - the word processing program beloved by so many loved in the DOS era - lose out to Microsoft Word? That has been the subject of some rather hot debate in my discussion boards this year,
But another reader countered with a chronology of WordPerfect's self-inflicted wounds. "Frankly, WinWord 2.x was a great program, well ahead of its time, especially if you ran it on Windows 3.0/3.0a as opposed to 3.1x. WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows (Q4-1991) was a dismal failure -- totally unstable, not feature-laden, and it even used a DOS-based installation program! WordPerfect 5.2 (Q1-1992) was a massive bug-fix, albeit small & fast. WordPerfect 6.0 (Q4-1993) was another buggy piece of crap, but it showed potential. Only when WordPerfect 6.0a (April, 1994) came out was there something worthwhile on the Windows front. By mid-1994, 2 1/2 years after the first version of WordPerfect for Windows came out, was there something reasonably stable. But by then, the damage was done and MS-Office 4.2/4.3 was available."
Of course, others pointed out Microsoft didn't exactly make it easy for anyone to compete with its Windows applications. "MS Office crushed its competition for one reason and one reason ONLY -- undocumented application programming interfaces," wrote another reader. "WordPerfect ran into problems because they invested big-time in a new graphical product for the operating system Microsoft touted as the future -- OS/2 -- while Microsoft was busily writing a competing product using secret programming interfaces for their real operating system of the future - Windows. Microsoft created and exploited intentionally undocumented Windows capability to ensure that its competitors' products would run like a dog, thus ensuring MS Office was the only viable choice on Windows -- and of course locked users into Windows with monopolistic practices well-documented in the various lawsuits they lost. You are giving the wolf credit for the excellent taste of lamb chops."
There are other explanations, however. "WordPerfect indeed ran into trouble when it did not move quickly into the Windows environment," wrote an anonymous observer from WordPerfect's former neighborhood. "They had plenty of time to respond to it but chose not to for whatever reason they may have had. Their top two owners (49.5% ownership each) had cultural differences from each other that distracted them from paying attention to the future of the product at that time. They parted ways by selling the WordPerfect organization to Novell for about $700 million. WordPerfect's legendary support had begun to decline prior to that sale. By that time, many of their programmers and support people had been fired (some my close friends) and most offices were empty with the lights off. That was well over ten years ago."
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6 Recommendations
I know why I, a loyal WordPerfect user switched to Microsoft Word.
I had started my masters thesis in WordPerfect, graduating to WordPerfect for Windows in 1993, and when I got past 12 pages of text, tables and graphs, it took forever for the system to update the view of the page I was trying to edit. The hard drive seemed to run incessantly. It only got worse as I added new content. I considered breaking my thesis up into multiple small documents of about 8 pages each.
Mostly out of frustration, I bought the new Microsoft Word, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it easily converted my thesis from a WordPerfect document to a Word document and effortlessly handled what was eventually several hundred pages. I've been using Microsoft Word ever since.