“The very first version of Microsoft Word for Windows was considered a “death march” project. It took forever. It kept slipping. The whole team was working ridiculous hours, the project was delayed again, and again, and again, and the stress was incredible. When the dang thing finally shipped, years late, Microsoft sent the whole team off to Cancun for a vacation, then sat down for some serious soul-searching.”
Can anybody tell me more about this development project and its problems? I’m interested in it from a sort of software project disaster point of view.
I thought it shipped concurrent with Windows 3.1 (or maybe even 3.0 ?) … were they originally trying to get it to work in one of the long-forgotten versions of Windows that came before 3? (for all 11 users thereof?)
I remember seeing it on the boss’s computer. The only thing I can recall of it was that it did not as of yet have Mac-borrowed / soon-to-be-Windows-standard shortcut keystrokes like Control-O to open a document file or Control-P to print or Control-V to paste etc. It had other, more DOS-like keystroke equivs like Alt-F7 or Shift-Alt-F3, that kind of thing.
According to Wikipedia, the first version of Word ran on MS-DOS, and the first version of Word For Windows ran on Windows 2.0, but poorly (because it had been designed for Windows 3.0 which was not yet available).
----- I spent my first summer at Microsoft writing CS, then returned the next summer to work on a secret new project. It was to be a modest word-processor to serve as an inexpensive entree to the business software market. By getting people used to our user interface, they would then be able to easily learn Multiplan and our future business products: Chart and File among them. By October of 1983, when Word Shipped, we had more than 30 programmers and one marketing guy in the now-getting-serious Applications Division. The problem was, Multiplan was already done and its user interface was already out there. I had to be compatible with it. My mission: write the world’s first word processor with a spreadsheet user-interface. It took five years to repair the damage. Microsoft Word, of course, went on to dominate the market and today is by far the most popular PC word processor. Read more about Richard Brodie’s experience at Microsoft on-line, this essay originally printed in the book Heart at Work edited by Jack Canfield and Jacqueline Miller. —
According to the wiki article from Keeve I found out that MS word version 5.5 is available as a free download. After a little trial and error I was able to run it on my XP machine using DosBox. If you don’t have a really old machine or don’t have DoxBox or don’t want to learn how to use it don’t bother.
I have to say that it’s really neat. If you’re a geek, anyway.
