3 ms·
It seems that Microsoft Word unseated far more established player WordPerfect even before OS dominance. Any insights on how this happened?
by sytelus 10y ago
It seems that Microsoft Word unseated far more established player WordPerfect even before OS dominance. Any insights on how this happened?
- Spooky23 10y agoMicrosoft was the office suite for the masses. WordPerfect acolytes were secretaries, writers, attorneys, etc who had mastered the keyboard shortcut system. WordPerfect broke some of that when they went GUI. They also had a weaker spreadsheet. There are still grumpy graybeard lawyers today using WordPerfect v.whatever from 1996. Later on they got squeezed between IBM muscling their customers onto Lotus Notes and Microsoft. That put them in the grave and Exchange filled it in.
- raesene9 10y agoSo I was an IT manager (well the only IT person for a ~50 person accountancy firm) back in 1995 and I can tell you how it unseated wordperfect in my org. Easy really... it was free! So basically if you bought Gateway PCs with Windows 95 you got Office 95 Pro for free with them. In a cost-constrained environment it was a no brainer compared to spending money on Wordperfect licenses. When I got there it was mainly Wordperfect for DOS and Lotus 1,2,3 for spreadsheets but when we rolled out new PCs with Windows 95 we migrated to Excel and Word. In terms of productivity there was a definite hit for "pro" users where they were faster with Wordperfect than Word but it was possible to get past that and Word used to have a pretty useful compatibility layer so you cold use Wordperfect commands in Word.