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"Innovation and Entrepreneurship" by Peter Drucker really makes you think about what your product aspirations should be.

I'm also fond of "Almost Perfect" http://www.wordplace.com/ap/
and "Peopleware" by DeMarco and Lister
and "The 10 Day MBA" by Silbiger

IMO, a successful entrepreneur needs some basic business sense in addition to whatever product the idea might be.
Reading some boring books and trying a few low-risk ventures can prep you for the big swing.

As I recall, Word Perfect was better than Microsoft Word in almost every respect. In fact, Word Perfect 5.0 is probably better in many ways than the current incarnation of Word. Sigh.

Word Perfect was the quintessential DOS-era, character based, word processor, ported to every operating system known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company.

Its struggles with the transition to a graphical UI did not begin or end with Windows --- and it stumbled badly as the word processor began to evolve into the integrated office suite. Almost Perfect

And it will become the year of the Linux desktop....
And the Hurd will ship...

These are not trivial issues, especially when Google's roadmap for Android is mostly about competing with iOS at the high end.

Wasn't KitKat designed for lighter footprint on smaller devices? They're not abandoning the low end. Also, computing history is littered with corpses of companies that tried to optimize for current hardware, but spent so much time/money that the hardware caught up to "bloated" software, and they were beat. Check out how this happened withWordPerfect. where they were so happy they used assembler, but lost to nimbler Microsoft. Having a business plan that depends that hardware doesn't progress much hasn't been too lucrative.

The writer needs to remember that the market changes rapidly. The iPhone as first introduced would hit this current market with a thud. Webapps on a 2G mobile browser? Yeah, not gonna sell.

Palm WebOS tried this already. Came from a company with some weight in hardware. Landed with a huge thud.

What about developers? This might be the toughest nut to crack.

Ya think?

There's going to be a massive chicken/egg problem here. I don't pretend to know apps in developing countries, but Facebook dropped 19Billion to buy network effects in developing countries. It's still a big thing.

And lets not forget Tizen, and Sailfish. The OS waters they want to plunge into are not even empty. Good luck. I like Firefox, but they have huge headwinds.

The fact is that neither Lotus nor WordPerfect ever successfully managed the transition from DOS text-mode to Windows GUI. This is due to a lot of factors, including bad management; W. Pete Peterson's book Almost Perfect is unintentionally revealing of this...

Almost Perfect [full text]

Word Perfect supported every platform known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company. In the DOS era it shipped with customized drivers for every printer known to man. The slightest change in the product became a nightmare to implement..

In the Windows era, the word processor would expand into the space occupied by print shop, desktop publishing and other applications. The quick-and-dirty solution for dozens of home, school, industrial and office projects,

Word Perfect didn't see that coming, didn't see its value.

Word Perfect never evolved into an integrated office suite, much less an integrated --- managed --- office system.

I imagine that without the Windows Hegemony, Microsoft would -never- have been able to kill wordperfect .

WordPerfect was a character based DOS era word processor ported to every platform known to man --- each with own fiefdom within the company. In late 1993, WPC had bloated to 5,500 employees and was bleeding red ink from every pore.

Almost Perfect

If you haven't read it, Almost Perfect is a good (free) book about the rise and fall of WordPerfect from the guy that ran the company for quite a while.

However, to MS's defense, WordPerfect never really go the GUI until MS was long out of the gate. However, MS used an entire series of underhanded tricks at the time to improve their products by using secret unpublished APIs that no one else knew about.

WordPerfect was a DOS era character based word processor that was ported to every OS and platform known to man, each with its own fiefdom within the company.

It struggled with the transition to a GUI world on both Windows and the Mac.

It struggled internally with the success of both Windows and the Mac --- at one point it was supporting 30 flavors of UNIX alone.

It struggled with the transition from a stand-alone word processor to the integrated office suite.

The "secret unpublished API" probably did less damage to WP than the exposed API for printing. The customized print drivers that helped carry WordPerfect to dominance in the eighties were no longer needed.

Almost Perfect

One of the three members of the trio who ran WordPerfect corporation, Pete Petersen, wrote a detailed book about the WordPerfect saga called Almost Perfect. Go read it now, it's a fascinating tale of a once-great company so busy shooting itself in the foot that it hasn't noticed that it's going down the tubes. WordPerfect Corp was doing such a good job of committing suicide that it really didn't need any help from Microsoft, or anyone else for that matter.

Also, while I'm not positive on this, I believe WordPerfect introduced the grammar-check before Word.

1991:

Microsoft had introduced a new version of WindWord at COMDEX (their official abbreviation for Word for Windows was WinWord, but I liked to add the extra d), and the new version included some new features we did not have. Among other things, they included a grammar checker and feature called Word Art. I liked to think the features were not very useful, but they did look very nice in a demonstration.

Almost Perfect - Chapter 13

Word Art survives, of course.

Similar capabilities exist in other programs. Apple's iWork, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org have an equivalent feature in more recent versions, and The GIMP's Script-Fu is somewhat similar (although often used for different purposes). OpenOffice.org's version is called Fontwork. WordArt also exist as a drawing option in Google Docs.

WordArt, Word Art Generator

Yeah, but do you remember WordPerfect? It was way way way better than Microsoft Word and always was.
WordPerfect deserved to win and Microsoft Word did not get it's dominant position through innovation or a superior product.

That is not how the story is told by someone who was there from the beginning:

In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

Afterword

What, in your opinion, were the critical marketing mistakes made by WordPerfect from your departure up until the acquisition by Novell?

WPCorp spent themselves to death. The last full year I was there (1991) sales were approximately $600 million and pre-tax profit was $200 million. In 1992, sales fell to about $570 million, but expenses grew to equal sales. 1993 sales were about $700 million (if that number can be believed), but expenses grew to more than $700 million. The employee count from early 1992 to the end of 1993 grew from about 3,300 to 5,500, and the company was bleeding cash.

WPCorp needed better products to compete, and they needed a suite of products. The products didn't get better, and selling a Borland Office (rather than a WordPerfect Office) was silly. By spending away all their cash, the company had no chance of recovering. By not developing better products in a productive and efficient way, the company had no chance of recovering. Given Microsoft's strength, perhaps WordPerfect Corp never would have been able to reclaim their number one position in the word processing market, but they could have survived if they would have kept their expenses in check.

Almost Perfect

In the DOS era, WordPerfect was supporting every platform known to man - and distracted by internal partisan rivalries. The transition to a GUI came particularly hard.

Speaking of Wordperfect and its failure to keep up, there was an interesting book on the subject called 'Almost Perfect'. I think I found it a year and a half ago from a Slashdot article, but could have been elsewhere.

Link to the free online version and downloadable PDF

Even if a successful company is fair and honest in every one of its business dealings, there will be a few lawsuits. The only way to avoid them is to stay unsuccessful and keep your pockets empty. As soon as you have something worth having, there will be someone else who will try to take it.

You know, I'm sure they used to say the same thing about Wordperfect, remember them

WordPerfect was the perfect word processor - but the word processor was no longer enough.

In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process. Almost Perfect
 

Nope. The founder of WordPerfect wrote a history of the company which is available online. At no point did he ever trust Microsoft or Bill Gates, nor did he believe that "OS/2 was the future".

My take is that WordPerfect was the king of DOS assembly programming and was always on top of the heap because of the sheer amount of functionality they could cram into 640K.

They simply had no clue how or desire to engineer a product for a more modern environment. (The terrible WP releases for Windows and OS/2 were also written in ASM.) They were hoping these GUIs were just a flash in the pan and everyone would go back to using DOS.

The only way Novell has a chance in this trial is if they can show that MS illegally leveraged OEM bundling agreements to push MS Office. (I can't really remember Office being bundled until long after WP was left for dead.)

But the best way to learn about computers is to program them. Even if it is within a constrained environment like LOGO or maybe SmallTalk.

I also think the schools should teach Web/Internet stuff, since the Internet will be around 10 years from now. I'm not so sure about MS.

An ideal High School level computer course would be to let kids loose in a room with some older computer parts (you know 486s and p90s) and few Linux CDs.

...richie