Text 41372, 87 rader
Skriven 2008-01-02 19:41:38 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 41369 av JAY EMRIE (1:123/140)
Ärende: Why did WordPerfect Go Wr
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JAY EMRIE -> ALAN ZISMAN wrote:

 AZ>> Jay and other WP fans may be interested in the article and discussion
 JE> on how WP
 AZ>> lost its #1 spot in the word processor world to MS Word:


 JE> IIRC, MS (Bill Gates) offered schools MS Word at a very reduced price
 JE> and in many cases free. When those students went out into the real
 JE> world guess what they wanted to use!

 JE> Word Perfect didn't even try to compete
 JE> therefore lost the battle.

Certainly Microsoft offered-- and continues to offer Word (and the full Office
suite) at much lower educational license rates-- just as they offer it at
cheaper rates to large enterprises buying bulk licenses... but I think the
story is more complex than that-- OpenOffice.org is available for free, but my
school system insists on buying a district-wide license for MS Office.

It takes a generation for students to enter the job market AND reach a point
where they exercise any control over purchasing decisions. In this case,
Microsoft was able to take over the market for word processor/spreadsheet/etc
software in a relatively short period of time.

The big changeover happened in the period 1993-96 (more or less); at the 
beginning of the 1990s, (Win 3.0 was released in 1990), DOS was still the
standard for corporate personal computers, with WordPerfect 5.1 the most widely
used word processor, some version of Lotus 1-2-3 the most widely used
spreadsheet, etc.

These programs cost $495 each (list price).

In the early 1990s, a couple of things happened:

1) In a relatively short period (1990-1995) Windows 3.0, followed by 3.1,
followed by Win 95 were released, and by the end of that period, had replaced
DOS on both home and (more slowly) business computers as the operating
environment (avoiding questions of whether they were 'real' operating systems
on their own).

2) Both WordPerfect and Lotus were relatively slow in releasing usable Windows
versions of their software-- both because they were at first focussing on OS/2
versions, and because their initial Windows 3.x releases were buggy, slow, and
late to market-- by comparison, Microsoft had versions of Word and Excel for
Windows in the late 1980s-- I used them with Win 2.0. They became available for
Win 3.0 with only minor patches, within a month or two of the Win 3.0 release--
and because these weren't version 1.0 of the product, were better Windows
products than either WordPerfect or Lotus's first releases for Windows.

Moreover, Microsoft had been the #1 software company for the Mac for a number
of years already, and had much more experience writing GUI-software than either
Word Perfect or Lotus had. (Both had written Mac software, but hadn't put much
effort into it, and neither had a top-selling product in the Mac market, which
Microsoft did).

3) Early in the 1990s, MS bundled Word + Excel together as MS Office-- both for
Mac and for Windows, with a list price MUCH lower than the cost of either Word
+ Excel purchased separately or Word Perfect + Lotus 1, 2,3 (or similar)... in
my opinion, this was the key factor. Again, both Word Perfect and Lotus
responded (eventually) with their own Windows office suites, but neither was a
powerful contender to MS Office-- Word Perfect's suite bundled WP with
Borland's Quattro-Pro, Lotus bundled 1-2-3 with Ami Pro word processor. In both
cases, these were products that were considered 'tier 2' products (though I was
a fan of Ami Pro, personally).

By about 1994 Lotus and Word Perfect got to the point that their core products
were good Windows programs, it was too late-- by then Microsoft had pretty
solid control over the office suite marketplace, with the exception of some
niche markets... for years, for instance, most law offices stuck with Word
Perfect which offered some features that made it a better fit for their
specialized needs.

Microsoft DID offer good deals to education-- though Word Perfect, for
instance, let schools (and non-profits) freely license older versions of WP if
a donor upgraded to a newer version-- something my school was happy to make use
of in the late 1980s-- but that's just another way of saying Microsoft
out-marketed its competition, something that is neither illegal nor immoral.

-- 
==================================
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca
(running on Mac OS X)

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