4 ms·

Not a deal of the century it would have just delayed the MS machine a little. Back then they either bought you out (Power Point) or they out Advertised or even

by baldfat 10y ago

Not a deal of the century it would have just delayed the MS machine a little. Back then they either bought you out (Power Point) or they out Advertised or eventually caught up and passes you (Word Perfect).

bluedino 10y ago
>> they out Advertised or eventually caught up and passes you (Word Perfect). WordPerfect kind of killed itself. They never embraced the GUI because they thought Windows was ugly. The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. They were all over the map trying to make a suite of strange, semi-office-related programs. When they went from 4.x to 5.0 they had to re-do the printer driver model, just as Windows was making specific dos printer drivers for your application obsolete.
- joshaidan 10y ago
  >> The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. It's kind of ironic how nowadays I prefer using Vim for coding and other tasks. And I also find myself preferring Markdown more and more whenever I can for a variety of tasks, from planning meetings to preparing presentations.
  - eli 10y ago
    Vim is a tiny fraction of a percent of word processor usage. Most people like GUIs.
    - babuskov 10y ago
      Yes. Most people who aren't in the tech just launch a word processor (word, libreoffice, etc.) Tech people on Windows use Notepad or a similar GUI program. Vim is used by a tiny, tiny fraction of people in the world.
      - Spivak 10y ago
        > Tech people on Windows use Notepad. I'm always horrified to see this. MS really shot themselves in the foot with the dev community by not providing a powerful text editor as the default. Getting a WinAdmin to enjoy the UNIX'y way of doing things is like trying to feed a child broccoli.
        jandrese 10y ago
        Also cmd.exe being a steaming pile of shit and the handful of commandline utilities that ship by default are mostly ancient DOS versions from the 80s. There are a couple of gems (netsh for example), but commandline on Windows is just painful. Powershell does give you a lot more potential, but I've found its syntax to be too verbose to be a comfortable commandline replacement.
        uxp 10y ago
        Powershell is an interesting environment. On one hand, it's almost a C#/CLR REPL with amazing power to program and script almost anything you could think of, but on the other it's not a shell and anyone coming from *nix that tries to think like a shell will be sorely disappointed in how verbose and unintuitive it behaves.
      - stephengillie 10y ago
        > Tech people on Windows use Notepad. Tech people on Windows use Notepad++ when they can. Vim is rarely used outside of editing config files on appliances.
        ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        This. Notepad++ has been my goto for years. It's tabbed, it does some highlighting. Opens literally anything. I've never wanted for more than Notepad++ offers by default. And if I did... there's plugins. I know a bunch of people who swear by UltraEdit too. I think Notepad++ vs. UltraEdit is like the far tamer Windows version of Vim vs. Emacs.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      Vim is not a word processor.
    - JupiterMoon 10y ago
      How awesome would vim key bindings for Libreoffice be though?
  - pivo 10y ago
    I remember talking to some very unhappy legal secretaries way back then when they were forced to switch from WordPerfect to Word. They used WordPerfect day in and day out and were very efficient at it's keystroke commands and loved it because it was fast. With its focus on the mouse and GUI slowness, Word was a very painful transition and productivity drain for them.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      Mouse is always easier for new users to learn. Keyboard is always faster for trained users and anywhere with tight processing performance metrics you'll see almost exclusively-keyboard users. Ironically, a lot of users still prefer mainframe applications over newer GUIs for the same reason. Source: I've worked for quite a few "on the floor" user processing centers for various types of data. 30s-2min per work item type of stuff.
    - smacktoward 10y ago
      But at least part of that resistance was the tech version of Stockholm Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome). They didn't love WordPerfect because it was better than Word, they loved WordPerfect because it was what they already knew and they had invested a lot of time in learning its idiosyncrasies. Moving to Word meant throwing all that learning out and having to start learning all over again, which they (quite naturally) didn't want to do. But none of that means that WordPerfect was a superior product; it really wasn't, especially for new users. It just means that people who were heavily invested in WordPerfect -- and there were a lot of those people back then -- didn't want that investment to have been for nothing. Microsoft addressed this issue quite effectively by providing a mode in early versions of Word that supported all of WordPerfect's key bindings. This let those hard-core WordPerfect users ease into the new application without having to learn a whole new way of working. Over time they discovered how much easier it was to use the mouse and WIMP interface, so the WordPerfect compatibility mode became less and less of a selling point. But at the beginning it was absolutely crucial to selling Word into organizations that had been bastions of WordPerfect use.
      - 10y ago
  - dagw 10y ago
    It's kind of ironic how nowadays more people are using Vim. Are they? Based on my totally unscientific observations vi(m)s popularity has dropped over the past 15-20 years
    - JupiterMoon 10y ago
      I think a lot of people are using vim emulators that bring the modal concept and keybindings in other software. Maybe NeoVim will eventually change this once vim can be embedded in a decent GUI and have addons that don't slow the how thing down to a crawl. P.S. I love vim but I love it enough to recognise flaws.
- baldfat 10y ago
  OK same kind of idea: Netscape vs Internet Explorer (MS just gave the browser away for free) For a good 6 months Netscape was out "selling" IE but eventually IE won the war for a good 15 years.
  - MikeTLive 10y ago
    microsoft publisher - licensed from the authors, rebranded, then given away killing the entire windows market for the original product on windows or any other platform
    - cwyers 10y ago
      Source? What was this original product?
  - bad_user 10y ago
    Back then Internet Explorer was the superior product, being fast and clutter free.
    - efaref 10y ago
      It's weird, but I really do remember IE4 being great.
      - baldfat 10y ago
        IE4 came out in Sept 1997 vs August 1995 IE. IE4 was the first time that IE was bundled with Windows. There was a ton of development with a huge IE development to catch up and eventually surpass Netscape. FUNNY IE 4 release story: > In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html
snaky 10y ago
Or they just hire away all of your key employees because VB cannot compete with Delphi. Microsoft did it with Borland, when in 30 months, Microsoft has hired 34 of the ailing software developer's key employees by offering large signing bonuses of several millions of dollars and other incentives.

by baldfat 10y ago

bluedino 10y ago

>> they out Advertised or eventually caught up and passes you (Word Perfect). WordPerfect kind of killed itself. They never embraced the GUI because they thought Windows was ugly. The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. They were all over the map trying to make a suite of strange, semi-office-related programs. When they went from 4.x to 5.0 they had to re-do the printer driver model, just as Windows was making specific dos printer drivers for your application obsolete.

joshaidan 10y ago
>> The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. It's kind of ironic how nowadays I prefer using Vim for coding and other tasks. And I also find myself preferring Markdown more and more whenever I can for a variety of tasks, from planning meetings to preparing presentations.
- eli 10y ago
  Vim is a tiny fraction of a percent of word processor usage. Most people like GUIs.
  - babuskov 10y ago
    Yes. Most people who aren't in the tech just launch a word processor (word, libreoffice, etc.) Tech people on Windows use Notepad or a similar GUI program. Vim is used by a tiny, tiny fraction of people in the world.
    - Spivak 10y ago
      > Tech people on Windows use Notepad. I'm always horrified to see this. MS really shot themselves in the foot with the dev community by not providing a powerful text editor as the default. Getting a WinAdmin to enjoy the UNIX'y way of doing things is like trying to feed a child broccoli.
      - jandrese 10y ago
        Also cmd.exe being a steaming pile of shit and the handful of commandline utilities that ship by default are mostly ancient DOS versions from the 80s. There are a couple of gems (netsh for example), but commandline on Windows is just painful. Powershell does give you a lot more potential, but I've found its syntax to be too verbose to be a comfortable commandline replacement.
        uxp 10y ago
        Powershell is an interesting environment. On one hand, it's almost a C#/CLR REPL with amazing power to program and script almost anything you could think of, but on the other it's not a shell and anyone coming from *nix that tries to think like a shell will be sorely disappointed in how verbose and unintuitive it behaves.
    - stephengillie 10y ago
      > Tech people on Windows use Notepad. Tech people on Windows use Notepad++ when they can. Vim is rarely used outside of editing config files on appliances.
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        This. Notepad++ has been my goto for years. It's tabbed, it does some highlighting. Opens literally anything. I've never wanted for more than Notepad++ offers by default. And if I did... there's plugins. I know a bunch of people who swear by UltraEdit too. I think Notepad++ vs. UltraEdit is like the far tamer Windows version of Vim vs. Emacs.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Vim is not a word processor.
  - JupiterMoon 10y ago
    How awesome would vim key bindings for Libreoffice be though?
- pivo 10y ago
  I remember talking to some very unhappy legal secretaries way back then when they were forced to switch from WordPerfect to Word. They used WordPerfect day in and day out and were very efficient at it's keystroke commands and loved it because it was fast. With its focus on the mouse and GUI slowness, Word was a very painful transition and productivity drain for them.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Mouse is always easier for new users to learn. Keyboard is always faster for trained users and anywhere with tight processing performance metrics you'll see almost exclusively-keyboard users. Ironically, a lot of users still prefer mainframe applications over newer GUIs for the same reason. Source: I've worked for quite a few "on the floor" user processing centers for various types of data. 30s-2min per work item type of stuff.
  - smacktoward 10y ago
    But at least part of that resistance was the tech version of Stockholm Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome). They didn't love WordPerfect because it was better than Word, they loved WordPerfect because it was what they already knew and they had invested a lot of time in learning its idiosyncrasies. Moving to Word meant throwing all that learning out and having to start learning all over again, which they (quite naturally) didn't want to do. But none of that means that WordPerfect was a superior product; it really wasn't, especially for new users. It just means that people who were heavily invested in WordPerfect -- and there were a lot of those people back then -- didn't want that investment to have been for nothing. Microsoft addressed this issue quite effectively by providing a mode in early versions of Word that supported all of WordPerfect's key bindings. This let those hard-core WordPerfect users ease into the new application without having to learn a whole new way of working. Over time they discovered how much easier it was to use the mouse and WIMP interface, so the WordPerfect compatibility mode became less and less of a selling point. But at the beginning it was absolutely crucial to selling Word into organizations that had been bastions of WordPerfect use.
    - 10y ago
- dagw 10y ago
  It's kind of ironic how nowadays more people are using Vim. Are they? Based on my totally unscientific observations vi(m)s popularity has dropped over the past 15-20 years
  - JupiterMoon 10y ago
    I think a lot of people are using vim emulators that bring the modal concept and keybindings in other software. Maybe NeoVim will eventually change this once vim can be embedded in a decent GUI and have addons that don't slow the how thing down to a crawl. P.S. I love vim but I love it enough to recognise flaws.
baldfat 10y ago
OK same kind of idea: Netscape vs Internet Explorer (MS just gave the browser away for free) For a good 6 months Netscape was out "selling" IE but eventually IE won the war for a good 15 years.
- MikeTLive 10y ago
  microsoft publisher - licensed from the authors, rebranded, then given away killing the entire windows market for the original product on windows or any other platform
  - cwyers 10y ago
    Source? What was this original product?
- bad_user 10y ago
  Back then Internet Explorer was the superior product, being fast and clutter free.
  - efaref 10y ago
    It's weird, but I really do remember IE4 being great.
    - baldfat 10y ago
      IE4 came out in Sept 1997 vs August 1995 IE. IE4 was the first time that IE was bundled with Windows. There was a ton of development with a huge IE development to catch up and eventually surpass Netscape. FUNNY IE 4 release story: > In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html

snaky 10y ago

Or they just hire away all of your key employees because VB cannot compete with Delphi. Microsoft did it with Borland, when in 30 months, Microsoft has hired 34 of the ailing software developer's key employees by offering large signing bonuses of several millions of dollars and other incentives.