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I am not prepared to swallow this notion whole.

WordPerfect thought it had the Almost Perfect word processor for the PC.

The DOS era ends and the era of MS Word, Windows and Office begins. The web begins to weave its spell and SharePoint becomes a billion dollar node in the evolving MS Office eco-system.

OpenOffice.org is funded and staffed by Sun.

The Mozilla Foundation receives about 85% of its funding from Google.

This tells me that the problems of the office suite and the browser are not solved and that society is still paying the price for development - and contributing to the profit margins of their corporate sponsors - even when these programs nominally evolve through open source.

The bill is simply hidden in the price of shopping through Google or in purchases of goods and services from Sun.

That raises the interesting question of whether this model is not in fact regressive. When your project is funded through Ad-Sense is it the WalMart shopper who keeps it afloat?

Microsoft is building a $300 million research campus for 5,000 in Beijing's university district.

It's true that 60% of Microsoft's revenues come from outside the U.S. It's also true that Microsoft is a significant employer and investor outside the U.S.

The multinational corporation is not the one-way street the Geek pretends.

More of the story about why the competitors lost market share:

1) Microsoft apparently was deliberately allowing piracy of Microsoft Office and other Microsoft products. I know this because I called the Microsoft legal department, accused them of allowing piracy, and forced them to stop some of the local pirate outlets. In response, Microsoft brought one court case. But the other pirates continued. Later Microsoft made it impossible to contact their legal department.

Legitimate suppliers of alternative products could not compete because computer customers were being offered pirated copies of Microsoft Office for $50 when bought with a computer -- or less.

2) The people who owned most of the WordPerfect stock did not WANT to compete. You can read the book about this written by the COO of WordPerfect, Almost Perfect, available online.

My opinion is that Microsoft allowed piracy, and that was the biggest contributing factor toward the failure of competitors.

http://www.fitnesoft.com/AlmostPerfect/

I book I think you might find enjoyable, a very good insight into the fall of WP.

There's a great on-line book on the rise and fall of Wordperfect by Pete Peterson: http://www.fitnesoft.com/AlmostPerfect/

Almost Perfect is a rollicking good read, with something for everyone in it.

The story I heard was that Microsoft lied to WordPerfect about its long term Windows strategy. This was supposed to have caused WordPerfect to spend its efforts developing for a version of Windows that never happened.

To respond to your well-written and accurate comment:

1) The ONLY thing that ANY printer company needed to do to get a WordPerfect printer driver, is send WP a printer on 'permanant loan' for us to write the driver for, then to subsequently troubleshoot those drivers on that printer. If any manufacturer wanted us to pull support for that printer, all they had to do is request their printer back - which N-E-V-E-R happened. For that reason, WP had a HUGE printer lab that I spent hundreds of hours in.

2) WordPerfect wasn't that late to the word processing market for Windows... When Win 3.1 came out, WP 5.1 for DOS was the reigning word processor. WordPerfect, in order to get into the market sooner, released WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows -- a horribly buggy version of WP.

The reason it was so bad was they stripped the user interface from the DOS version and put a Windows interface on it. At WordPerfect, we called this the WISIWYWA - What You See Is What You Want (As opposed to ....What You Get) This was primarily due to WP5.1 Win still using the DOS print drivers. The Bug Fix for WP 5.1 Win was WordPerfect 5.2 -- still using the DOS print drivers.

A more accurate claim would be that WordPerfect was slow to market with a STABLE version of WPWin. WPWin 6.0 was a complete re-write of the code base to work within the 16bit Windows OS, of course by that time they were late to market.

3) One reason why WP was slow to market with WPWin 6.0 was a bitter debate taking place between the top brass at WP. Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian (The Pres/VP) wanted to support Windows, whereas Pete Peterson wanted to support OS/2... heh heh. Anyone remember OS/2?

Alas, WordPerfect was, in fact, Almost Perfect

Sure, they were late on the GUI, and they took some risks on other platforms, but they had the momentum to change their technological mistakes, if they could have survived the changes the VC imposed on them, I think that they would have had a good chance of still being the dominate Word Processing company.

FYI, the founder of WordPerfect has an history online that discusses the Windows/OS2 issue.

I'm pretty sure that the version of WP/2 that I used was both the hackneyed Windows port and the gold version (not beta). Either way, having your own print drivers on either OS/2 or Windows was inexcusably stupid.

See my other reply on why the betaed OS/2 version sucked -- it was a mangled version of the Windows version that didn't run as well as IBM's compatibility, not the real OS/2 version.

You are right that OS/2's Windows support helped kill OS/2, although in this case, you got the Windows version one way or the other because WordPerfect could not afford the resources for the now-completely-split code base.

I do not know all the details, but I suspect there is sufficient counterargument to the argument that "Microsoft dropped support for OS/2 before any 32-bit version was released", for a variety of reasons including prerelease PM development kits, early impressions and perhaps assertions that the two environments would be able to run PM code, trying to figure out what was really happening, etc.

You do not product management, let alone discard years of work and reorient your development teams to work in a crippled Windows environment overnight, let alone release a product. The misdirected pursuit of OS/2 was deadly. Almost Perfectgives some indication of this, although I would not credit Pete Peterson for really good grasp or account of things.

Here is an insiders story about what happened to WordPerfect, from start to finish.

Granted, you wouldn't write a word processing suite in assembler,

Shhhh! Don't tell that to these guys:

In October 1978 [...] Barnaby began coding WordStar. In four months, Barnaby wrote 137,000 lines of bullet-proof assembly-language code. Rubenstein later checked with some friends from IBM who calculated that Barnaby's output was equal to 42 man years. [link]

...or...

For the past three years, [Jeff Wilson] has been employed by WordPerfect Corporation as a software engineer. While there, he participated in development of WordPerfect for the Apple IIe/IIc computer line. He is currently managing development of WordPerfect for the Atari ST, which should be available shortly after you read this. He programs exclusively in assembly language, and enjoys it! [link]

Also, from what I understood, the WordPerfect Corporation actually required that all programs be written in assembler. BTW, some more interesing WP history.

Oh, you mean, you wouldn't use assembler to write a word processing suite nowadays. Ok, I getcha. Yeah, I think you're right. After all, WordPerfect Corp has been out of business for how long? (Well technically, bought out and resold, and resold... They're just a name now.)

• The demise of streetcars was instigated (in part) by the automobile vendors (GM in particular). Some major cities (i.e. NYC, Philadelphia, and San Francisco) never did remove their trains (only Phillie and San Francisco had trollies though). The technical reasons why we probably don't have an extensive train system in the U.S.A. is that the population is widely spread out than say in Europe, so having individual based transit is more efficient than mass transit.
• The death of beta was due to Closed Standards instigated by Sony. Sony did not want to license beta, so their competition (led by Phillips and JVC) revolted and rushed the (inferior) VHS standard to market. The market place crushed beta for popular use. Sony was very careful not to repeat that mistake with compact disks, and was much more open in the licensing process.
• The similar death happened to IBM's microchannel bus, which blew the doors off ISA which was the competing technology in the mid 1980's.
• I think wordstar failed due to distribution channel and management problems (much like Visicalc). Although I lived through this time, I was already a professional developer and not a word processor user (except for troff at that time).In W. E. Peterson's Almost Perfect , he cites a decision to address user interface problems at the expense of performance as a cause of alienation of die hard wordperfect users as the turning point.

• The death of Wax Cylinders was most likely due to the high volume to surface area ratio (storage might have been problematic too). You could not even use the inner surface of the cylinder.
• The death of slide rules was due to a lack of precision, very few people could do more than 3 digits of precision on slide rules, so discretization and round off errors accumulated. Also, slide rules are slow compared to electronic devices (although data entry might be faster for a good practictioner, the mechanical motion is slow as is recording of intermediate results).
• As someone who consulted at Commodore, I think it is safe to say that the Amiga died due to a combination of bad management (which didn't address stability issues and penetration of the US market) and a failure to innovate, e.g. using sprites for graphics animation was a trick to get games to be responsive enough at the time, but not a good long term solution.