6 ms·
One thing a lot of people misremembers is just how long it took. Microsoft Word was launched only couple of years after WordPerfect, in the early 80s. It didn't
by xorcist 4y ago
One thing a lot of people misremembers is just how long it took. Microsoft Word was launched only couple of years after WordPerfect, in the early 80s. It didn't dominate word processing until the middle of the 90s.
It took more than a decade. They basically built out the features and waited until their competitors made some strategic mistake, of which they made several in that decade.
It was pretty much the same with Netscape and MSIE. That monopoly misuse probably helped, but Netscape also seemed bent on killing itself. Despite the mismanagement, it still took almost five years.
Perl was more popular than Python for more than a decade. Having much of the early web developed on it didn't help in the long run. First mover advantage might be a thing, but it never wins in the long run. And in the long run, ten years is nothing.
- neilv 4y ago> They basically built out the features and waited until their competitors made some strategic mistake, Microsoft Word was a loser, but then they changed out the operating system under the winners.
- filmgirlcw 4y agoYes, but the winner also refused to get with the times and embrace the operating system twice. First, they were abysmally slow to Windows 3.1, despite having years to get something together (in part b/c they understood that Microsoft wanted to win at word processing but they underestimated the importance of being on the OS anyway) and then a few years later with Windows 95. Word Perfect had the OS changed from under them but also had every warning that the change was coming and refused to move to sturdier ground.
- neilv 4y agoThat's too bad. It was pretty easy to write off Windows 3.1, and continue to be a solid solution on MS-DOS and with Netware, etc. But Windows 95 had a lot of fanfare in advance that suggested it would have much better uptake. And Windows NT in parallel was developing a credible foundation, and it got the "new shell" as an option around the time of Win95. My recollection at the time was that the writing should've been on the wall, that Windows was going to be the Microsoft platform. If WordPerfect was slow to move, that's a bad combination with, er, not as direct of access to the platform teams.
- wombatpm 4y agoPerl killed itself with the Perl5 transition to Perl6. I lived the 3->4 and the 4->5 transitions. When I wanted to try my hand at OOP, I ran screaming from Perl5 to Scheme and eventually Python. 20 years later I'm still programming in Python.
- dragontamer 4y agoAh yes, but Python nearly killed itself in the Python2 -> Python3 transition.
- melagonster 4y agoguess everyone learned that don't try this.