The War Of The Word

atari_kid writes "For who didn't know Microsoft has a internal blogging service, which is becoming popular with their employees. And even some of their high level managers have their own blog like Chris Pratley, a group program manager (GPM) for Word2002 (OfficeXP) project. Mr. Pratley just blogged on his 'personal philosophical' conversion from a Mac geek to a Microsoft devotee & his interesting perspective on the 'Word Processor' wars of the mid-90's and why Microsoft won."

Comments

The Old New Thing

[Anonymous Coward]

The best Microsoft employee blog is the Old New Thing. I don't think you'd get far arguing your anti-Microsoft points with Raymond.

WP 5.1 - those were the days

[Nom du Keyboard]

Although I use MSWord because that's what the world uses, and am a power user who is both a writer and a more than competent VBA programmer. I know where I speak from, however...

I still keep Word Perfect 5.1 on my 386-SX based Toshiba notebook. Notebook and word processor run just fine, and to this day would meet 99% of my needs if I didn't have to exchange documents with others (meaning they send me MSWord files).

I remember when WP succeeded because they supported a wide variety of hardware, and most every printer in existence -- unlike anyone else at the time.

And when they failed by not forseeing the quick move to MSWindows 3.0 and above.

Those were the days. What days? The days when there was still compeition in our industry.

Too ironic

[maximino]

Oh, I love this:

The Word planning team discovered that the WordPerfect sales force was going around to customers and showing Word opening a complex WordPerfect file (printer.tst) to show how bad the conversion was, and therefore how pointless it would be to try to switch to Word. So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then).

And of course Microsoft now uses open file formats, which mean that OpenOffice can seamlessly open Word files. Microsoft would certainly never try to keep people using its products by suggesting that other products would be unable to open its files. It's features and price that sell product today, boys and girls!

That's it

[Otter]

So, that in a nutshell is the Microsoft method. Understand the market, and the customers, and then go pedal to the metal, with release after release focused on what the customers need, incorporating their feedback. That puts the competition into reaction mode. And of course it helps if they also make a strategic error because they are under so much pressure.

Or, to put it another way: version 1 sucks, version 2 sucks, they keep pushing on, version 3 isn't bad, 4 is better, 5 is pretty good, 6 is excellent. Of course, at that point they've improved as much as they can, things start getting clunkier and the Linux knockoff has reached the quality of version 4.

But it's a better plan than a) making something good, systematically ruining it and then suing Microsoft or b) making something that sucks, freaking out and making something else that sucks and then suing Microsoft, the two primary approaches of their competition.

Quickly over quality?

[jared_hanson]

After a year of distrusting the company somewhat, I began to gain an appreciation of how Microsoft worked, and to see it for what it was - a machine that was focused on building products that people wanted, as quickly and as well as they could. Note the "quickly" - this was what distinguished MS from Apple in the end - a focus on moving quickly, and beating the competition. Details like great design were not critical to most customers, so that didn't really make it into the products, except where it mattered to the customer.

I haven't read the whole thing, but I wanted to comment on this. His argument makes sense for a certain amount of time, but that time may come to a halt quickly. Microsoft's core business units (Windows and Office) are quickly becoming commodity prices. The efforts of Linux and OpenOffice are, in most respects, equaling the features found in Microsoft products. At the same time, the number any new features added often just bloat the product. When this happens, you have to start competing on quality.

Linux does this as an OS in the server room. However, as a mainstream desktop, Linux lacks in the quality department (ease of use, interface consistency). However, Windows isn't the greatest at these things either and open source should see a huge hole for stealing market share if people get behind efforts to improve the quality (UI, etc.) of the desktop product.

Apple has demonstrated the validity of the quality thinking, unfortunately they seem content to remain a niche market player. I really respect Apple for this, but would love to see Linux take a page from their quality book and read it to the mainstream.

Head Hunter Fodder

[malia8888]

I used to be a corporate head hunter, finding great people from one company and moving them to a competitor's company.

If I were still in that business I would be mining those in company blogs for the best talent. If I were Microsoft I would make those strictly available for internal use only.

True, it would be difficult to romance someone away from the biggest "bestest"; however, many of us have been trapped under an evil middle management boss at one time or another and would be willing to defect.

Re:I call fake blog

[Golias]

What makes this not astroturfing is that the guy comes right out and says he works for Mircrosoft. If he hid that information before rambling about how nifty MS is, then he would be following in the Grand Tradition of his company.

I remember the Windows "switcher" fiasco with fondness. IIRC, what got them busted was using public-domain clip-art photos as the people who supposedly switched. People were like, "hey, wasn't she just telling me to refinance my mortgage in a pop-up add last week?"

Infered tactics

[Intrigued]

The most important aspect of this article is the insight that it shows in how to become the front runner in a software battle.

Key points are:

• Look for major shifts in disruptive technology and be prepared to ride the wave ahead of the opponent
• GUI in this case, WP missed it and couldn't play catchup quick enough
• Don't forsake backward compatibility
• Apple did it with IIe to Mac, WordStar did it in this article. It gives people the opportunity to re-evaluate a leveled playing field when they are already pissed at you.
• If you have to play catchup, don't alienate your users with a crappy, halfbaked compromise
• Backward compatibility doesn't mean backward thinking
• Research and play on the design grievances against the current front runner
• Word was designed against WP defects
• Develop features and function against the mud slinging of the front runner
• takes the sting out of the foundation of the front runner argument
• Cross compatibility
• =backward compatibility - if the road that the fake detour sign points to looks better than the real road, it will be believed.

These are some excellent insights that GPL software designers should keep in mind. Both from the stance of priority in design and what to expect from the competition.