They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and

They won by making a good Office. The "standard" at the time was Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and dBase III. Lotus's suite included AmiPro as a word processor, and while it did WYSIWYG layout like nobody's business, it wasn't really ready for any document-heavy work (legal, etc.). Approach wasn't half bad, though. WordPerfect offered Quattro Pro as a spreadsheet and Paradox as a database, but it was defintely a bunch of applications in a box rather than an office suite. Word had the advantage of the move to Windows and WYSIWYG - WordPerfect for Windows (and WP6 for DOS in WYSIWYG mode) meant nearly as big a change as moving to Word did, so n o loss there. The Excel crew had gone way out of their way to make everything 1-2-3 compatible. And Access was less wacky than Paradox, so the dBase croud didn't miss Borland all that much. None of the Office apps were, by themselves, at the top of the game at the time, but they were all good enough... and they worked and felt as if they were all of a piece.