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Microsoft beat WordPerfect in the transition to Windows. This was the product that eventually killed WordPerfect and gave them a decades long monopoly in word

Microsoft beat WordPerfect in the transition to Windows. This was the product that eventually killed WordPerfect and gave them a decades long monopoly in word processing that still exists. Lotus 123 suffered a similar fate against Excel.

tinus_hn 8y ago
WordPerfect had stagnated and lacked features. That’s why it died.
- melling 8y ago
  No, that’s not accurate. They took too long to get to Windows. Then Microsoft created the Office bundle and never looked back.
- nradov 8y ago
  To some degree WordPerfect also failed due to a classic "Innovator's Dilemma" situation. They had a huge customer base of MS-DOS users and tried to keep them happy by maintaining a similar user experience in the Windows edition. And they were fairly successful it that goal, but the product ended up looking weird and counter intuitive to new users who were familiar with the standard Windows look and feel. The lesson is that sometimes you need to have the courage to disregard what existing customers want.
  - dpark 8y ago
    > The lesson is that sometimes you need to have the courage to disregard what existing customers want. The problem is that this can kill you, too. If you abandon your current customers, chances are that they’ll choose a new solution because you’ve taken away their “easy path” upgrade and also pissed them off. You also send a message to your potential new customers that you won’t care about them if it becomes inconvenient. This is the real innovators dilemma: there is no path to guaranteed (or even likely) victory. You can take a chance on the future but it is likely to kill you faster than clinging to the past.
    - nradov 8y ago
      Sure there are no guarantees. Even leaders who understand the innovator's dilemma eventually miss a disruptive shift in the market and lose their dominant position. That's why I'm not too concerned about the current dominance of large tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In 50 years MBA students will probably be reading case studies about how they screwed up and were acquired for pennies on the dollar by competitors who don't even exist today.
robaato 8y ago
I loved the WordPerfect "RevealCodes" mode - made style management really easy. Word hid everything in paragraph markers (or section markers). Suddenly things become opaque and you get in to the mode of "create a new doc and copy and paste everything into it except for the final paragraph marker" - this is the equivalent of Ctrl+Alt+Del for a Word doc, and I use it to this day... Sigh...

tinus_hn 8y ago

WordPerfect had stagnated and lacked features. That’s why it died.

melling 8y ago
No, that’s not accurate. They took too long to get to Windows. Then Microsoft created the Office bundle and never looked back.
nradov 8y ago
To some degree WordPerfect also failed due to a classic "Innovator's Dilemma" situation. They had a huge customer base of MS-DOS users and tried to keep them happy by maintaining a similar user experience in the Windows edition. And they were fairly successful it that goal, but the product ended up looking weird and counter intuitive to new users who were familiar with the standard Windows look and feel. The lesson is that sometimes you need to have the courage to disregard what existing customers want.
- dpark 8y ago
  > The lesson is that sometimes you need to have the courage to disregard what existing customers want. The problem is that this can kill you, too. If you abandon your current customers, chances are that they’ll choose a new solution because you’ve taken away their “easy path” upgrade and also pissed them off. You also send a message to your potential new customers that you won’t care about them if it becomes inconvenient. This is the real innovators dilemma: there is no path to guaranteed (or even likely) victory. You can take a chance on the future but it is likely to kill you faster than clinging to the past.
  - nradov 8y ago
    Sure there are no guarantees. Even leaders who understand the innovator's dilemma eventually miss a disruptive shift in the market and lose their dominant position. That's why I'm not too concerned about the current dominance of large tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In 50 years MBA students will probably be reading case studies about how they screwed up and were acquired for pennies on the dollar by competitors who don't even exist today.

robaato 8y ago

I loved the WordPerfect "RevealCodes" mode - made style management really easy. Word hid everything in paragraph markers (or section markers). Suddenly things become opaque and you get in to the mode of "create a new doc and copy and paste everything into it except for the final paragraph marker" - this is the equivalent of Ctrl+Alt+Del for a Word doc, and I use it to this day... Sigh...