6 ms·

Strange. All I know about WordPerfect is that my company's lawyer, a classic loyal WordPerfect for DOS type, tried really hard to make the first version of Wor

by hga 12y ago

Strange. All I know about WordPerfect is that my company's lawyer, a classic loyal WordPerfect for DOS type, tried really hard to make the first version of WordPerfect for Windows work for him, but it kept dropping all his tables and/or illustrations to the bottom of his documents, and he gave up. That strikes me as more than "a little buggy" as I read skimming the last few chapters; granted, I heard they did better than their other competitors who couldn't even make something that wouldn't GP fault. I also seem to remember reading about some craziness where it insisted on using its own printer drivers, a competitive advantage they had in the DOS era, in Windows. So I have to wonder how much technical merit or lack thereof had to do with their failure; then again, the afterword's figures are appalling, without revenues initially suffering they overspent wildly, removing their margin for recovering from any number of screwups.

leeoniya 12y ago
reminds me of http://i.imgur.com/clSvSzG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/clSvSzG.jpg
- hga 12y ago
  Heh, indeed. Except I've never found Word for Windows anything less than rock solid, perhaps I missed an iffy version. But I do remember buying 1.0 or slightly later way back when, and using many versions since then. Not a program I use regularly, but when I do rather heavily, e.g. for documentation, it was rock solid by the summer of 1994.
thejacenxpress 12y ago
That's funny you mention the lawyer thing. My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs, and even Word, but he still swears by his WordPerfect (and now that I think about he still uses AOL). I didn't read through the manuscript but I'm curious ifWP targeted lawyers back in the day.
- aeturnum 12y ago
  My dad is also a lawyer and is extremely sad about the demise of WP. I wonder if there's something about the feature set that makes it good for lawyers.
  - Curmudgel 12y ago
    For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.
  - EpicEng 12y ago
    Wow, same with my Mom, who is a lawyer.
  - benjohnson 12y ago
    This could be incorrect: I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
  - chiph 12y ago
    Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
  - kazinator 12y ago
    I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :) I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product. And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software. A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten. Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers "A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
w1ntermute 12y ago
Why Lawyers Love WordPerfect: http://www.microcounsel.com/nextgen.htm http://www.microcounsel.com/nextgen.htm
Angostura 12y ago
I used to absolutely love the Mac version back in the early 90s. Odd that the Windows version was so appalling.
DanBC 12y ago
Moving to windows killed many products so they're not unusual. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html But WordPerfect had some spectacular failures and the buggyness of WP for Windows was a factor in their death.
keithpeter 12y ago
http://www.lgrossman.com/mjnk/mjnk1198.htm http://www.lgrossman.com/mjnk/mjnk1198.htm Grossman was writing a blog before there were blogs. He was a lawyer of some kind working for a government agency in Chicago.
hackuser 12y ago
It's a myth that the Windows version of WordPerfect was bad software; I'm not sure where that comes from. 1) The initial version had some problems but was fine, I think by v5.2. Regardless, by WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, most software reviews picked WordPerfect as superior to Word. I and many others I know preferred WP into the 2000s, at least. It was good software. 2) IIRC, a major reason Word became dominant was because of anti-competitive practices by Microsoft. Microsoft required computer manufacturers to purchase an Office license for every Windows license. As a result, every new computer came with Office installed. I believe Microsoft was convicted of violating anti-trust law or settled with the government, but too late for WordPerfect. My memory is vague on this point, however, and I'm surprised nobody else mentioned it. 3) Also, IIRC, Office was easier to integrate with other software, in part because it was object-oriented and because of Visual Basic. That made it appealing in the corporate market. Finally, many here wonder why the legal industry preferred WordPerfect for so long (as did government). IME the reasons were A) Legacy; attorneys were heavy users of WP for DOS, when it dominated the market; B) Word offered no benefit in return for retraining users and converting all the legacy data, customizations, and macros; C) WordPerfect was better for power users, due to the fine formatting control, and many legal secretaries and others were power users. I recall one legal secretary's response to Clippy: 'No I don't want help formatting a letter -- I've been formatting them for 20 f!@#%! years!' D) Government liked WordPerfect's built-in SGML editing. I always thought WP should have used Reveal Codes and some updates to sell itself as a low-end XML or HTML editor.
- Maarten88 12y ago
  > It's a myth that the Windows version of WordPerfect was bad software; I'm not sure where that comes from. Besides that it was slow and never felt like a native Windows app, the biggest problem I remember was that it tried to replace the Windows printing subsystem with its own driver system, which was very confusing and caused problems for other Windows programs. It could not even install on Windows NT. That said, Word for Windows 1.0 also had many quirks. When Windows 3 came out, the push buttons in Word did not change to the new 3D style, as they had custom-coded every single control, including standard buttons and text boxes. Amipro (later bought by Lotus) was i.m.o. by far the best early Windows wordprocessor. They, (and not WP) prove that the best software did not win in the market.
FranOntanaya 12y ago
Oh, the nostalgia. A few people I knew swore by WordPerfect, because it had the most features of the editors known around here. I really dreaded trying to navigate its menues and figuring out why things were buggy. It was a bit frustrating back then, because I thought maybe I was just having a mental block with it. Fortunately, I had WordStar and loved it so much I didn't ever really miss WP, but still took me a few years to understand there was such a thing as software hype.
mschaef 12y ago
Both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 faced some of the same sorts of issues in the early 80's, and both product teams made choices that left them unable to respond effectively to Windows. To set the context, rewind the clock back to 1987. (Bear with me here.) In 1987, the IBM PC (running DOS) is well established as the dominant business personal computer. However, thanks to the easy availability of Microsoft's DOS, and the almost completely open hardware design, a huge array of PC clone vendors has effectively taken over the market. In 1987, the clone vendors own the low end on price and own the high end on performance. (Compaq beat IBM to shipping an 80386 based machine by a year or so, and the Deskpro 386 was three times faster than IBM's best PC AT). IBM has effectively completely lost control of the market they started. To respond, IBM develops a completely new line of PC's, the PS/2, and works with Microsoft to build the next generation OS: OS/2. OS/2 is intended to be the first mainstream multitasking, protected memory OS for personal computers. The combination of the two is supposed to advance the state of the art so far, that (in combination with IBM's proprietary bus license) the clone vendors will be completely shut down and unable to compete. Both IBM and Microsoft convince the ISV's that OS/2 is the wave of the future and where new platform investments should be made, instead of Windows. Both Lotus and WordPerfect release all sorts of cross platform versions of their flagship products (VMS, SCO Unix, NeXT, etc.... everything but Windows, because it's obsolete.) By the time 1989-90 rolls around, it's pretty clear that IBM's strategy has fallen apart. The machines are too expensive, not compatible enough, and the features that customers actually care about (VGA, etc.) are all available on cheaper/faster clone machines. OS/2 has also fallen short because it's expensive and requires special software to work as it should. (For existing DOS software, old OS/2 was a major step backwards). Into this chaos, David Weise and Murray Sargent, both of the Microsoft Windows team come up with a way to run existing Windows applications in protected mode. (This is a non-management supported skunkworks project... MS management was still behind OS/2 at the time.) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365635.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365... What winds up happening is IBM and Microsoft split up their partnership, and Microsoft charges forward with protected mode Windows, in the form of Windows 3.0. Windows, always cheaper than OS/2, now contains all of the important OS/2 features and works better than OS/2 for your existing DOS programs. Basically in an instant, the entire momentum of the industry went from trying to figure out how to make OS/2 work to a wholesale adoption of Windows. The ISV's had to respond in turn. For Microsoft, this was easy... they'd always been on Windows, mainly because they had to. For everybody else who'd been driving to OS/2, it was a major change in priorities. API's were different, the graphics model was different, in some cases, companies had to switch to GUI's from CLI's... I don't think it was premeditated, but the change in platforms ave Microsoft a huge advantage that they absolutely jumped on.

by hga 12y ago

leeoniya 12y ago

reminds me of http://i.imgur.com/clSvSzG.jpg http://i.imgur.com/clSvSzG.jpg

hga 12y ago
Heh, indeed. Except I've never found Word for Windows anything less than rock solid, perhaps I missed an iffy version. But I do remember buying 1.0 or slightly later way back when, and using many versions since then. Not a program I use regularly, but when I do rather heavily, e.g. for documentation, it was rock solid by the summer of 1994.

thejacenxpress 12y ago

That's funny you mention the lawyer thing. My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs, and even Word, but he still swears by his WordPerfect (and now that I think about he still uses AOL). I didn't read through the manuscript but I'm curious ifWP targeted lawyers back in the day.

aeturnum 12y ago
My dad is also a lawyer and is extremely sad about the demise of WP. I wonder if there's something about the feature set that makes it good for lawyers.
- Curmudgel 12y ago
  For what it's worth, I also know several lawyers that were unhappy when they were eventually forced to switch from WP to Microsoft Word.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  Wow, same with my Mom, who is a lawyer.
- benjohnson 12y ago
  This could be incorrect: I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
- chiph 12y ago
  Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
- kazinator 12y ago
  I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :) I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product. And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software. A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten. Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers "A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."

w1ntermute 12y ago

Why Lawyers Love WordPerfect: http://www.microcounsel.com/nextgen.htm http://www.microcounsel.com/nextgen.htm

Angostura 12y ago

I used to absolutely love the Mac version back in the early 90s. Odd that the Windows version was so appalling.

DanBC 12y ago

Moving to windows killed many products so they're not unusual. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html But WordPerfect had some spectacular failures and the buggyness of WP for Windows was a factor in their death.

keithpeter 12y ago

http://www.lgrossman.com/mjnk/mjnk1198.htm http://www.lgrossman.com/mjnk/mjnk1198.htm Grossman was writing a blog before there were blogs. He was a lawyer of some kind working for a government agency in Chicago.

hackuser 12y ago

It's a myth that the Windows version of WordPerfect was bad software; I'm not sure where that comes from. 1) The initial version had some problems but was fine, I think by v5.2. Regardless, by WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, most software reviews picked WordPerfect as superior to Word. I and many others I know preferred WP into the 2000s, at least. It was good software. 2) IIRC, a major reason Word became dominant was because of anti-competitive practices by Microsoft. Microsoft required computer manufacturers to purchase an Office license for every Windows license. As a result, every new computer came with Office installed. I believe Microsoft was convicted of violating anti-trust law or settled with the government, but too late for WordPerfect. My memory is vague on this point, however, and I'm surprised nobody else mentioned it. 3) Also, IIRC, Office was easier to integrate with other software, in part because it was object-oriented and because of Visual Basic. That made it appealing in the corporate market. Finally, many here wonder why the legal industry preferred WordPerfect for so long (as did government). IME the reasons were A) Legacy; attorneys were heavy users of WP for DOS, when it dominated the market; B) Word offered no benefit in return for retraining users and converting all the legacy data, customizations, and macros; C) WordPerfect was better for power users, due to the fine formatting control, and many legal secretaries and others were power users. I recall one legal secretary's response to Clippy: 'No I don't want help formatting a letter -- I've been formatting them for 20 f!@#%! years!' D) Government liked WordPerfect's built-in SGML editing. I always thought WP should have used Reveal Codes and some updates to sell itself as a low-end XML or HTML editor.

Maarten88 12y ago
> It's a myth that the Windows version of WordPerfect was bad software; I'm not sure where that comes from. Besides that it was slow and never felt like a native Windows app, the biggest problem I remember was that it tried to replace the Windows printing subsystem with its own driver system, which was very confusing and caused problems for other Windows programs. It could not even install on Windows NT. That said, Word for Windows 1.0 also had many quirks. When Windows 3 came out, the push buttons in Word did not change to the new 3D style, as they had custom-coded every single control, including standard buttons and text boxes. Amipro (later bought by Lotus) was i.m.o. by far the best early Windows wordprocessor. They, (and not WP) prove that the best software did not win in the market.

FranOntanaya 12y ago

Oh, the nostalgia. A few people I knew swore by WordPerfect, because it had the most features of the editors known around here. I really dreaded trying to navigate its menues and figuring out why things were buggy. It was a bit frustrating back then, because I thought maybe I was just having a mental block with it. Fortunately, I had WordStar and loved it so much I didn't ever really miss WP, but still took me a few years to understand there was such a thing as software hype.

mschaef 12y ago

Both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 faced some of the same sorts of issues in the early 80's, and both product teams made choices that left them unable to respond effectively to Windows. To set the context, rewind the clock back to 1987. (Bear with me here.) In 1987, the IBM PC (running DOS) is well established as the dominant business personal computer. However, thanks to the easy availability of Microsoft's DOS, and the almost completely open hardware design, a huge array of PC clone vendors has effectively taken over the market. In 1987, the clone vendors own the low end on price and own the high end on performance. (Compaq beat IBM to shipping an 80386 based machine by a year or so, and the Deskpro 386 was three times faster than IBM's best PC AT). IBM has effectively completely lost control of the market they started. To respond, IBM develops a completely new line of PC's, the PS/2, and works with Microsoft to build the next generation OS: OS/2. OS/2 is intended to be the first mainstream multitasking, protected memory OS for personal computers. The combination of the two is supposed to advance the state of the art so far, that (in combination with IBM's proprietary bus license) the clone vendors will be completely shut down and unable to compete. Both IBM and Microsoft convince the ISV's that OS/2 is the wave of the future and where new platform investments should be made, instead of Windows. Both Lotus and WordPerfect release all sorts of cross platform versions of their flagship products (VMS, SCO Unix, NeXT, etc.... everything but Windows, because it's obsolete.) By the time 1989-90 rolls around, it's pretty clear that IBM's strategy has fallen apart. The machines are too expensive, not compatible enough, and the features that customers actually care about (VGA, etc.) are all available on cheaper/faster clone machines. OS/2 has also fallen short because it's expensive and requires special software to work as it should. (For existing DOS software, old OS/2 was a major step backwards). Into this chaos, David Weise and Murray Sargent, both of the Microsoft Windows team come up with a way to run existing Windows applications in protected mode. (This is a non-management supported skunkworks project... MS management was still behind OS/2 at the time.) http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365635.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365... What winds up happening is IBM and Microsoft split up their partnership, and Microsoft charges forward with protected mode Windows, in the form of Windows 3.0. Windows, always cheaper than OS/2, now contains all of the important OS/2 features and works better than OS/2 for your existing DOS programs. Basically in an instant, the entire momentum of the industry went from trying to figure out how to make OS/2 work to a wholesale adoption of Windows. The ISV's had to respond in turn. For Microsoft, this was easy... they'd always been on Windows, mainly because they had to. For everybody else who'd been driving to OS/2, it was a major change in priorities. API's were different, the graphics model was different, in some cases, companies had to switch to GUI's from CLI's... I don't think it was premeditated, but the change in platforms ave Microsoft a huge advantage that they absolutely jumped on.