Almost Perfect - The Rise and Fall of WordPerfect

http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml

by soundsop • 17 years ago

68 24 17 years ago

shaunxcode3• 17 years ago

Wow I am stoked to read this. I grew up in the shadow of wordperfect/corel/novel and always imagined I would end up working for one of them. The first "hacking" I ever did was in jr high when I finally got to mess with computers all day - which had been donated by wordperfect and thus permanently shined with the blue of wp5. At 16 I got my CNA and landed a job at novel, however after starting to sign papers they informed me you had to be 18. Great. Changed my mind, traveled the world, lived in england, fell in love with programming, ended up back in utah valley 6 years later. Actually worked as a developer for a company that was in the first novel building down by geneva steel and later with another company at what was the wordperfect complex.

Now I realize the future I always imagined working for one of these companies is only going to come from creating it myself. It's interesting that his story starts with a recession forcing his hand into innovating.

I wouldn't normally make a long winded "personal" post on hn but I figured no one else is really going to care about word perfect history so I may as well give my two cents for posterity. Anyway back to building the dream - what else are weekends for?

ojbyrne2• 17 years ago

Novell? Also isn't Corel in a completely different part of the world (Ottawa, Canada) than Wordperfect/Novell (Utah)?

shaunxcode3• 17 years ago

Good call on the typo - and Corel bought Word Perfect at some point or the merged/regurgitated into each other how ever you want to look at it.

wyclif• 17 years ago

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Still the gold standard word processor. Alt- & Ctrl- keystroke macro libraries, and remapping any key as a macro:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

I remember running WordPerfect 5.1 on an 8mhz 8086 with 640k of ram. Amazing achievement considering the multi-gigabyte bloatware suites of today.

greatfog• 17 years ago

"the gold standard" -- Amen. WordPerfect 5.1 fulfilled every one of my (modest) document needs. If I buggered something up, the View Codes mode allowed me to find and fix the embuggerance. I bought Microsoft Office only because response to job postings required resumes in Word .doc format.

dchest3• 17 years ago

I read this book twice, and I highly recommend it for everyone in software business. It's incredibly interesting and useful.

icefox• 17 years ago

What exactly do you recommend about it? I spent the evening reading it and can only conclude that they were really lucky and nothing more. They had a product that wasn't half bad (though the author likes to point out time and time again about the bugs, issues and outright problems) combined with the fall of all of their competitors makes for a lot of being in the right place at the right time. They have near zero ability to create new products other then by luck. They waste money left and right. They live through their major competitor loosing because they fail to transition to a new platform and only shortly after do the exact same thing learning nothing. The guy goes on and on about how to best run a company only to discover that no one listened to him and that was not how the company actually ran. They didn't kill unprofitable projects, watch where money went, and the author gives the impression that they didn't seem to properly invest in real products or ideas. He briefly mentions highering bright students and a few minor things, but most of the book doesn't mention that much about the development practices good or bad. For having a single product be such a cash cow you would think year after year they would try to improved their development and learn from their mistakes, but there is no mention of it. Also very little is mentioned of who the leads of development were as time went on as though developers don't really matter as long as you have some. For the main product that you live and die on you would think more attention would be spent on it. You can have horrible customer support if your software is fantastic. The lesson I got out of it would be to always consider the worse case. Although they wanted OS/2 to win if Windows won the worst case is that they would loose their cash cow. They should have started as soon as possible even if it meant paying a dozen developers on a dead end project. Heck start two completing sub companies to make a windows word perfect and pick the winner after X months, they had the money. With the extra money they should have taken their time on making new products doing it right rather then rushing out dozens of toy applications. New applications didn't need twenty languages and fancy boxes and manuals. Push it out there and see what worked, kill what didn't. It was only the luck of all the money of WP that allowed all of the mistake after mistake to be tried. Once DOS was over it was no surprise that it went south. I would much rather recommend a book less on luck and more on doing the right things as you will get a lot more out of it.

dchest3• 17 years ago

I would much rather recommend a book less on luck and more on doing the right things as you will get a lot more out of it.

"Doing right things"/success story books won't teach you about mistakes they made. You better learn how you can fail, because you can repeat failure, but you probably will not repeat success by using the same methods as in success story books.

alain94040• 17 years ago

The irony of course is that the site has Google ads all over, and they all push Microsoft Word...

Anyway, I'd like to hear the story of how the book rights went back to the author, that's unusual.

dchest3• 17 years ago

I don't see irony here. The book describes the rise and fall of WordPerfect. The final part is about, as you can guess, losing to Word.

dinkumthinkum2• 17 years ago

Right, I think that is called "evidence" rather than irony. :)

idiopathic2• 17 years ago

I don't about this case, but in general all the book contracts I signed have clauses for the rights of a book to go back to the author. A typical condition is the author's request to write a new edition and the publisher's refusal to do so (eg from low sales).

amichail• 17 years ago

Anyone remember SpeedScript?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript

adamsmith• 17 years ago

If anyone wants to save five minutes and use the PDF I put together to send to my kindle, email me at adam at viratech dot c-o-m!

allenbrunson• 17 years ago

there is already a pdf of the book on the linked site. how is yours better or different? i'm not a kindle user, so i don't know the details.

idiopathic2• 17 years ago

Kindle does not read PDF as a native format. Instead, you can send the file as an attachment to a kindle email address and Amazon's server converts it into the azw (originally mobipocket) format. This the file on offer and getting it direct saves five minutes. (Thanks for the offer!)

PostOnce• 17 years ago

Only within the past two years have the Florida courts begun supporting MS Word. My mom still writes all her briefs in WordPerfect. It's the only place I know that uses it, but there are probably other government agencies.

Also, speaking of word processors, does anyone else here use Write Room/Dark Room/JDarkRoom or similar?

dinkumthinkum2• 17 years ago

You're right, lawyers use WordPerfect like nobody's business. I've met many lawyers that don't even know Microsoft Word exists.

plinkplonk• 17 years ago

From the book

"Near the end of the first lecture, I explained what WordPerfect Corporation was not. This set the stage for the next two days, when I would explain what WordPerfect Corporation was.

WordPerfect Corporation was not a platform for personal achievement, a career ladder to other opportunities, or a challenging opportunity for personal improvement. The company did not put the needs of the individual ahead of its own. The company was not concerned about an employee's personal feelings, except as they related to the company's well-being.

WordPerfect Corporation was not intended to be a social club for the unproductive. While other companies might condone many personal or social activities at the office, ours did not. Things like celebrating birthdays, throwing baby showers, collecting for gifts, selling Tupperware or Avon, managing sports tournaments, running betting pools, calling home to keep a romance alive or hand out chores to the children, gossiping or flirting with co-workers, getting a haircut, going to a medical or dental appointment, running to the cafeteria for a snack, coming in a little late or leaving a little early, taking Friday afternoon off, and griping about working conditions were all inappropriate when done on company time. Even though these activities were condoned by many businesses across the country, we felt there was no time for them at WordPerfect Corporation."

While all this can be justified, why would anyone want to work at a compnay like this?

I found this interesting since most companies these days at least pretend to do many of these things in order to attract and retain a talented workforce. There is no mention of any ESOP like scheme either. But WP made a lot of money so they must have done something right and hired at least a few good people.

Maybe the eighties was just a different time.

JulianMorrison• 17 years ago

Was their product a Good Hack?

ckinnan• 17 years ago

From the book:

"Sadly for Micropro, the one thing they could not do very easily was update their product. After their luck at getting the CP/M version of WordStar running on the PC, they could not seem to get an updated version out the door. They decided instead that they would produce an entirely new product, one which was easier to maintain and improve than the original version.

Luckily for us, the new WordStar, introduced at COMDEX as WordStar 2000, was entirely different from the old product. Micropro intentionally attempted to replace their market leader with a product that was bigger and slower and used a different interface. Although it was not obvious at COMDEX, the product was doomed from the start. In spite of all the product hype and the size and beauty of the Micropro booth and presentation, the new product did not stand a chance.

Micropro did more for us at that show than we could ever have done for ourselves. They convinced their customers that the old WordStar was not very good and that they needed to look for something better. Not only would these customers take a look at WordStar 2000, but they would also look at WordPerfect 4.0."

Almost Perfect - The Rise and Fall of WordPerfect

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