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,
One reader even took the position that WordPerfect's support model was a big factor in its undoing. "I remember when the gold-standard for support was WordPerfect Corp. They sold most of their product based on the great and FREE support they provided. They even provided support for people who stole their software. Look what happened to WordPerfect. They found the cost of support exceeded the gains found by providing it for free, and started charging. That was the end of the company since their software was by that time not the superior product."
Or does the real blame lay with IT managers, and their bosses, who couldn't say no to Redmond? "Back when Office 97 had been removed from all of the various computer magazine's recommended lists because it was so buggy, you could buy a server copy of WordPerfect for $1500, which allowed up to 255 users! And WordPerfect was stable and easy to use. When I complained about the decision in the government agency where I worked at the time to switch to Office 97, I was told 'It makes more strategic sense to align ourselves with Microsoft.' So, it makes sense to buy a product that was more expensive, buggier, and harder to use! These management types don't have the sense God gave crabapples. They used to say that nobody was ever fired for buying IBM. Now it's MickeySoft. We definitely need to be using other products -- ANY other products."
What do you think? Post your comments about this story below.
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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.