I had a hard time settling on a forum for this one – if it needs moving, mods, you have my blessing.
The facts as I understand them: until the '90s, Corel’s WordPerfect was the dominant word processing program on the market. Sometime early in that decade, Microsoft Word took over the leading position, at least in part because it was included in Microsoft Office. Word has been the most popular word processing program ever since.
My question is this: do you believe there was any way for Corel to have kept their position as market leader?
Related questions: Was Word’s success primarily a result of Microsoft’s bundling and leveraging power, or are there other reasons that came into play? Did Corel make bad business decisions, did Microsoft make exceptionally good ones, or some of each?
This is in IMHO because I figure there’s not going to be a factual answer for a lot of these questions.
I’m not looking for a discussion of which program is better than the other, although if usability studies show a clear overall preference for one or the other, that’d be interesting to know.
I’m hoping not to see the thread devolve into an anti-Microsoft tirade. I’ve never used WordPerfect myself, but that’s a matter of circumstance, not principle.
First off, it was WordPerfect Corporation’s WordPerfect, not Corel’s. By the time Corel bought 'em, the fight was over.
I used WordPerfect from ~1984 to ~1995 or so, and yeah, it was waaaay better than anything on the market at that time. In the late 80s - early 90s, MS had a DOS version of Word that pretty much sucked compared to WordPerfect. However, when Windows really started to become popular, Word for Windows started to gain market share. WordPerfect eventually came out with a Windows based word processor, but it came so late and not really as good as Word for Windows that I don’t think it ever really competed.
So, IMO, Windows is what really killed WordPerfect. Back in the DOS days, no other word processor touched it.
I agree. The original Word Perfect for Windows (I think it was something like 5.2, with 5.1 being a DOS version) was pretty much the DOS version that happened to run on Windows. As such, it offered all the glitches of Windows without any of the alleged improvements of the graphical user interface.
For the record, Mrs. Kunilou STILL uses only Word Perfect, and the Kunilou kids have been brought up on it. The later versions of WP offer more value in their bundles than Word (IMHO), but the program itself really is no better than Word.
The death knell for the WordPerfect suite (as well as for Lotus’ 1-2-3) was Windows 95. Microsoft, since they had been giving pre-developer releases of Chicago to their Office team for years, was the only company capable of being on-pace to get a full 32-bit office suite out the door day and date with Windows 95. When consumers walked into computer stores in August 1995, they could grab Windows 95… and right next to it, in a box that looked just like the box for Windows 95, was Office 95. The only version of WordPerfect for Windows available at that point was still 16-bit and “built for Windows 3” – ie, outdated.
Novell (I think it was Novell who owned WP at the time) got their WP office suite for Windows 95 out the door within a few months, but htey missed the bubble, and Microsoft Office took the lead. Since then, momentum has driven Microsoft to dominance.
Word 2002 is better, at this point, than WordPerfect 11 (at least, from my limited experience… most of my work is done on a Mac, and I don’t own any PCs, so I only have the choice of Word v.X). Word 95 didn’t beat out WordPerfect 7 (?) because it was better, however. It beat it because it was first, and it was first only because Microsoft owned both Word and Windows.
I worked for Novell for a while. They bought WordPerfect in 1994, and then sold it to Corel in 1996. At the time, Novell was trying to out-Microsoft Microsoft, and they bought up all the lessers to everything Microsoft had. Dr-Dos, Word Perfect, etc.
Man did I hate Word Perfect. They tried to make it the company standard (which makes good business sense, since they owned it) but nobody would use it; it was just so non-intuitive compared to Word.
I’d used a number of Word Processors before Word (WordStar, vi, ed, MS-Dos’s edit, etc.), so it’s not just a matter of growing up with Word and not knowing any better about WordPerfect. It really stank.
I was told at the time that there were a lot of features in Word Perfect that made it ideal for lawyers, but I really don’t know what those were.
So, to answer the OP, I think it was a combo: Microsoft had bundling power which pushed Word, but IMHO Word is and was just a much more solid product.
Longtime WP user here - In addition to what everyone else said the initial MS Windows Office suites were truly integrated and apps were designed from the ground up to share data and common library modules. The suite of apps that WP cobbled together to compete was not anywhere near as well integrated and suffered in the head to head evaluations made by large businesses interested in standardizing on a common integrated platform.
I still use WP for Windows (up to version 11 now) and MS Word XP.
I STRONGLY disagree that WP for Windows was necessarily inferior. Version 7 of WP was at least as good as competing Word products and in some ways was better. I used both, regularly, and I preferred WP7 over the Words of the time. God, give me back Reveal Codes.
However, Corel was - well, not the best run company on earth. Michael Cowpland sort of fancied himself the Canadian Bill Gates, J.D. Rockefeller, and Hugh Hefner rolled into one, and after acquiring the WordPerfect franchise decided to turn Corel into a supercompany, competing with not only Microsoft but IBM, Dell and Compaq as well. Corel became an early investor and proponent of the “Net computer” idea, which was basically a computer with no hard drive that would run programs off the internet. This might have worked were it not for the fact that home computers kept getting faster and cheaper. Hundreds of millions were lost.
Corel’s attempts to come up with an integrated office suite were equally disastrous; while Wp7 was a fine product, everything else in the suite sucked royally.
Result; Corel bled money. Attempting to do everything at once, they succeeded in doing nothing. They had no choice but to give up on most of their efforts. WP8 was terribly buggy, and since then Word has outstripped them in every way (except that they still have not added Reveal Codes!)
As a user, I found WordPerfect to be a fantastic word processing program and I still prefer it to Word. But, from an administrative point of view, Corel’s WordPerfect 10 sucks monkeys. It would constantly screw up on our peer to peer W98SE network–granted that is certainly far from a great environment to run it on. It seems that it just wouldn’t work with Windows and needed constant registry tweaking or just reinstallation. I’ve heard that they came out with a patch that makes it work better with Windows, I’ve since moved onto Word and ain’t looking back.
RickJay, Word can’t have “reveal codes.” Unlike WordPerfect, which treats its documents as strings of text which are, in effect, tagged with codes, Word documents are a series of nested containers… document containers, page containers, paragraph containers, word containers and character containers. Each of these containers is associated with various properties, with the most direcly-applied properties outweighing default or style type properties.
So Word can’t do “reveal codes,” because every letter of every word, and every space, and every paragraph, would be buried and split of from its peers in a sea of code. The best it can muster is “reveal formatting” where you point and it tells you the font, size, style, etc.
That container system is also why Word sometimes does nasty things, like when you backspace from the start of one paragraph and run into the end of the previous one, the previous one takes on the formatting of the second one… because you just told Word to merge those two containers.
Stan J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis explain MSWord’s rise to dominance (among other Microsoft successes) in their book Winners, Losers & Microsoft. The reasons they give pretty much echo what the posters above have stated. Like most economic analysists, Liebowitz and Margolis provide plenty of graphs, e.g. :
[ul]
[li]market share vs. time[/li][li]price vs. time[/li][li]ratings of product quality vs. time[/li][/ul]
for all the major players in the word processor market. Other markets are covered with similar depth, to support their thesis that market failure/economic inefficiency has not (yet) occured in the software industry.
yeah that whole reveal code thing sucks big time on Word. I really don’t like Word, it’s so not meant for a “regular” office person i.e. non-engineering type individual.
Another factor leading to the domination of WordPerfect in the pre-Office 95 days was WordPerfect’s customer support.
They had (24-hour, IIRC) FREE technical support, and you did not need to supply them with a serial number to use it.
This meant that anyone could copy their friends (or their office’s) copy of WordPerfect, and still get state-of-the-art technical support, by a company that seemed to value skilled technical support at a level that I would think is not found anywhere today.
Sure, this lead to a lot of pirated copies, but it also created a huge base of WordPerfect users who carried their skills into offices across America.
When Wordperfect sold their product to Novell and then to Corel, this unique and valuable FREE resource went the way of the buggy whip.
In my experience, the first version or two of WordPerfect for Windows was simply inferior to Word, without any major advantages. And as companies and offices upgraded to Windows and no longer could use their DOS-based WordPerfect word processor, they bought the Office suite to go along with thier new operating system, and Word soon became the defacto word processing program in the businessplace. As people got thier own computers at home (or upgraded) they obviously wanted to use the same programs they were used to using at work. Without the free tech-support (and free pirated copies), there was no longer a big incentive to use WordPerfect.
I grew up on WordPerfect 5.1 on the old Compaq luggable my mom used to bring home from work. I tried Word for DOS and saw why WP was the market leader at the time. I think that WP lost market share due to both MS’s ability to write Word along with pre-release Windows and the rather shoddy management styles of both Novell and Corel.
Anyone who worked with very long, complex documents (auto-generated TOCs, indices) or needed very precise control over lists and / figures was better off with WordPerfect. When using Word with tables or lists, I still sometimes think how I would do it easier and faster in WP. And with inserted pictures and such, you could actually attach a caption, instead of creating a text box and grouping it together.
I still have 5.1 kicking around somewhere, but Word’s importing leaves a lot to be desired and WP won’t work with my printer.
Speaking as a long-time secretary, Wordperfect was a blessing to use, as it was designed for people to make changes and modify stuff as you go along, as opposed to Word, which assumes people are going to type something, then format.
Wordperfect blew it when they wouldn’t allow the compatibility with other programs, like Word does. Secondly, with each new release, they changed a good deal of their codes, and more importantly, their Macro language. It made for a learning curve for each new release – even though most of the modifications were great, it made you slow down.
I still use Wordperfect for many, many tasks (certain Table issues, certain formatting corrections, many macro tasks), but for any document that will be sent to another user, I have to use Word because of the compatibility issues.
Fuckin’ well told, brutha. I’ve always preferred WordPerfect to Word. Unfortunately, outside of legal work, you really couldn’t get a gig without Word. The bastards beat me down.
My office only uses WordPerfect…version 5.1 for DOS, no less It really isn’t that hard to set up and run the program on Windows machines; we have versions of Windows from Win98 to Win XP (whatever was current when we got each computer) and each one purrs right along with WP5.1.
We are a court reporting firm, so WordPerfect is ideal for what we do, and almost all of our clients use WordPerfect for some, if not all, of their wordprocessing. Admittedly, the boss’ total opposition to changing the software we use has a lot to do with why we are still using the DOS version rather than one of the later versions (are they up to 11 now, sheesh). Her point being that “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Makes sense to us
It really isn’t that hard to set up and run the program on Windows machines; we have versions of Windows from Win98 to Win XP (whatever was current when we got each computer) and each one purrs right along with WP5.1.