
Almost perfect: the rise and fall of WordPerfect Corporation (1993) - mmastrac
http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml 
======
filmgirlcw
So this was published a year before the company was sold to Novell for big
bucks, AFTER this guy was canned. So there is an ax to grind, for one. Not to
say the history isn't interesting, but this is one of those memoirs written
from the perspective of the ousted dude (who wasn't even a founder) who is so
sure he was the wronged party.

It's still a good read.

The book I would always like to read would be from Bruce Bastian, the co-
founder that got Peterson (the author of this book) the job. Why? Because he
was Peterson's brother-in-law.

So Bastian is a really interesting guy. Peterson writes him off as being kind
of a "dreamer" and downplays a lot of his brilliance, but others have noted
the importance his smarts played with making WP good. Anyway, in 2000 or
something, he came out of the closet, which is like a huge deal if you're like
the pinnacle Mormon software company in Utah. IIRC, he was totally shunned by
a lot of people from his former company, including his co-founder.

He now gives money to charity, donated millions to equal rights causes and
generally seems to be a good, decent man.

Anyway, I'd really love to read about what it was like to be closeted in that
type of environment in that period of time, while also building what was at
one time, a massively successful software company.

~~~
bkirkby
timeline isn't exactly accurate. i worked at wordperfect/novell from 1992-2000
as a system and then software consultant (WordPerfect SWAT then Novell
Consulting) and bruce was already out of the closet when i started.

i ran into him in the slc airport once when i came back from a business trip
to sydney australia. my visit happened to coincide with sydney's gay and
lesbian mardi gras. when i saw bruce i said "hi" (even though he had no idea
who i was) and told him i had been to sydney on business. he said "i went to
sydney for pleasure."

didn't seem like he felt the need to be "closeted" or even shy about his
sexuality then. iirc, this was around 1995.

fwiw

~~~
filmgirlcw
I trust you. I know he was still married and wasn't "out" when it sold to
Novell (at lawyer, not publicly), but by '95 that could have changed. I last
read up on this stuff (including Peterson and Ashton's hateful comments about
him) seven years ago or so.

~~~
bkirkby
novell bought WP mid-1994 iirc. i went to work for WP late 1992. i don't know
the details of when a divorce was final or any such thing so he might have
technically been married then. i also have limited knowledge of the culture of
outing and what criteria people use to say they are now "out" as opposed to
"in", so i can't really speak to when the official outing was.

all i know is that as early as late 1992 it was well known throughout the
company that bruce was gay and that he had a boyfriend assistant working for
him.

in the office water coolers i was around (when i wasn't traveling) there
seemed to be a lot more concern about perceived nepotism than perceived
homosexuality.

------
AshFurrow
One of my favourite passages discusses what they tried to discourage in the
office (from Chapter 11 –
[http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ap_chap11.shtml](http://www.wordplace.com/ap/ap_chap11.shtml)
)

> Things like celebrating birthdays, throwing baby showers, collecting for
> gifts, selling Tupperware or Avon, managing sports tournaments, running
> betting pools, calling home to keep a romance alive or hand out chores to
> the children, gossiping or flirting with co-workers, getting a haircut,
> going to a medical or dental appointment, running to the cafeteria for a
> snack, coming in a little late or leaving a little early, taking Friday
> afternoon off, and griping about working conditions were all inappropriate
> when done on company time.

This stands really in stark contrast to companies today. Can anyone who has
been in the industry long enough chime in on how they feel changes like these
have affected things like morale, productivity, etc?

Edit: grammar.

~~~
x0x0
from ch 11

    
    
       WordPerfect Corporation was not a platform for personal achievement, a 
       career ladder to other opportunities, or a challenging opportunity for 
       personal improvement. The company did not put the needs of the individual 
       ahead of its own. The company was not concerned about an employee's personal 
       feelings, except as they related to the company's well-being.
       
       WordPerfect Corporation was not intended to be a social club for the 
       unproductive. While other companies might condone many personal or social 
       activities at the office, ours did not. Things like celebrating birthdays, 
       throwing baby showers, collecting for gifts, selling Tupperware or Avon, 
       managing sports tournaments, running betting pools, calling home to keep a 
       romance alive or hand out chores to the children, gossiping or flirting with 
       co-workers, getting a haircut, going to a medical or dental appointment, 
       running to the cafeteria for a snack, coming in a little late or leaving a 
       little early, taking Friday afternoon off, and griping about working 
       conditions were all inappropriate when done on company time. Even though 
       these activities were condoned by many businesses across the country, we 
       felt there was no time for them at WordPerfect Corporation.
    

This guy sounds like a real dick. I mean, sure -- running a betting pool at
the office is a big waste of time. But this guy is independently wealthy, so
of course errands are no problem: you can almost always trade money for time.
But going to a medical or dental appointment is not to be done? When exactly
are you supposed to see your doctor, given they work M-F 9-6? And I bet they
weren't shy about asking for extra time from employees when it's crunch time
or there's an urgent bug.

~~~
dudus
from ch 15

"A year after I left, I received an anonymous letter from someone at
WordPerfect Corporation. This person used WPCorp stationery, WPCorp postage,
and, no doubt, WPCorp time to tell me he was glad I had left the company. Even
though the writer admitted he had never met me, and that he had never worked
for me or in a department which reported to me, he had gone out of his way to
tell me what a poor job I had done. I was a little hurt by the comments, but I
was even more upset that this employee would misuse company resources to send
the letter. He was obviously not focusing in on the purpose and objectives of
his employer."

Seems like he had a dick reputation that lasted some time after he left the
company.

~~~
SilasX
Wow. That's like out of a supervillain's script in a movie. "Sure, you may
hate me, but what really bothers me is wasting a few bucks!"

------
steven2012
I'm old enough to actually have been a user of both WordPerfect and Word in
the early days, so I saw the rise and fall of WordPerfect, along with the rise
of Word and MS Office, through the eyes of a user.

Basically, Wordperfect was the best word processor out there during the late
80s to early 90s. Keep in mind that at the time, most people did not do their
own word processing.

WordPerfect 5.2 I remember as being the very best word processor out there.
However, Microsoft came out with MS Word for DOS, and I remember distinctly
using Word 2.0. At the time, there were a lot of issues where sometimes when
you typed on Word, you would get snow on the screen, but it was pretty fast
compared to WordPerfect. The rumor was that Microsoft was using special APIs
that WordPerfect (and any of their other competitors) didn't have access to
that allowed them to have faster performance and smaller latency when dealing
with larger documents, etc. But WordPerfect was clearly the superior program.

The key was that WordPerfect didn't adapt well to Windows. When Windows 3.1
came out the version of Word for Windows was excellent, vs the version of
WordPerfect. WordPerfect was really clunky from what I remember, and as
Windows took off, they never really got any traction and as more version of
Windows and Word came around, the difference between Word and WordPerfect grew
cavernous. By 1995, if I remember, no one even considered WordPerfect as
viable compared to Word.

Then the whole Corel/WP debacle occurred which cemented the death of both of
those companies.

~~~
teh_klev
I'm must be older than you I guess :) . I was heavily involved in typesetting
work between 1986 and 1990 (offset litho printing [0]). One of the tools we
used for authoring was WordStar (and PostScript - we wrote a pile PostScript
using WordStar's very capable text only editor mode).

WordStar beat the pants off of WordPerfect for technical layout and
hackability when it came to printers and the like for rush documents. I used
to mod WordStar to support printer escape sequences where there were none
using a hex editor. That dated back to at least around 1985.

I still miss WordStar, its keycords (^K^B to begin a block), context menus and
loads of other things outshone WordPerfect for technical writing. I wrote
thousands of lines of DBase II/III and C using WordStar's text mode. Hell,
even Brief (circa 1988) implemented the same keycords as WordStar, it was
really popular with DOS app programmers back then (e.g. the Clipper season
based releases before Clipper 5 arrived).

But then that was maybe the dev in me. WordStar _was_ more versatile as a tool
for both Word Processing and as a text editor. However WordPerfect was more
loved by the non-technical writers and I can kinda see why, but I could never
get my head around the function key sequences.

* caveats here being that I wasn't introduced to vi until 1987, just as I left college, and didn't have affordable access to unix until I stole a copy of SCO Unix for x86 around 1992.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_lithography)

~~~
steven2012
George Martin, author of the Game of Thrones series, STILL uses Wordstar on
DOS to this day. :)

[http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_r_martin_writes_on_dos_based_wordstar_4_0_software_from_the_1980s.html)

------
YokoZar
I think a missing part of the story here is what happened to WordPerfect after
it was sold off to Corel. Corel realized that Microsoft would be one hell of a
competitor with Office, and (correctly) feared that Microsoft would abuse
their Windows monopoly to push it.

Corel responded incredibly boldly, by rolling their own Linux distribution and
bundling Wine, which in turn was sponsored by Corel. Unfortunately, they were
a bit too ahead of the technology with this move, as neither Wine nor Linux
were quite ready enough to usefully run desktop applications other than
WordPerfect.

~~~
fractallyte
WP 8 was native Linux/Unix. It used Motif, and was very stable - a superb word
processor. This version was bundled with Corel's Linux OS deluxe edition. With
a bit of effort, it even runs comfortably on modern systems.

(The included docs mention a terminal version of WP 8, but, sadly, it doesn't
exist...)

Version 9 onwards used WINE.

~~~
xiaomai
Those were good days, I remember buying the boxed version of WP8 (with Tux on
the cover) from CompUSA.

------
hga
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.

~~~
hackuser
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
> 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.

~~~
hackuser
> Besides that it was slow and never felt like a native Windows app

I'm not sure what version you used, but by 6.1 it felt lighter and quicker
than Word IMHO, and I'm pretty sure it had a standard Windows interface -- at
least neither I nor the many users I supported had problems with the UI.

> it tried to replace the Windows printing subsystem with its own driver
> system, which was very confusing and caused problems for other Windows
> programs.

Maybe you are thinking of the initial Windows version. I supported many users
and systems who used WP for Windows, and I knew others who did the same, and
these were not common user problems that I recall. WP did use its own print
drivers or provide those as an option, I think to provide more accurate
WYSIWYG. Occasionally WP itself would have problems because it somehow
integrated the print driver in WYSIWYG (a good idea if you think about it),
but I don't recall other applications having problems.

------
SoftwareMaven
The Utah tech sector was really made by Word Perfect and Novel. The University
of Utah and Brigham Young University provided the tech talent that really
didn't want to leave the state, and WP and Novel provided the jobs and,
ultimately, the capital that started many of the companies south of Salt Lake
City that turned the area into a tech hub (the UofU's graphics program was
crucial to companies like Evans and Sutherland further north).

It is unfortunate that, today, we don't have that kind of "anchor" company in
our "Valley". Omniture was starting to take on that role, but it sold to
Adobe. Adobe has turned the area into a second home, becoming an anchor to
quite the little tech office community between Salt Lake City and Provo, but
it's not the same as having a company headquartered and growing capital here.

I started working in the area right as WP was starting to ramp up speed on its
downward slide. I remember working at a small company, going through resumes
of people laid off from WP, seeing one guy who had spent the last 5 years
working on the "File" dialog. These guys were also making double or more the
going rate for software engineers.

As a young software engineer, I learned an important lesson at that time: make
sure I keep learning and changing, because every company fails and it's really
hard to get a new job when your career has been as the "File" dialog guy. I
also learned some important business lessons about what _not_ to do from WP
and Novel, most of which came from hubris more than anything.

------
geargrinder
I was a technical writer in the late 80's and early 90's, and had the
opportunity to extensively use most of the popular word processors.

One thing I remember about WordPerfect was how much they bragged about having
a large customer service center to answer user questions. They often showed
pictures and advertised how many reps they had and how many calls they took.

WordPerfect was difficult to use even for professionals like me.

When Word for Windows came out, with a more intuitive interface (not that much
different from some Mac word processors that had been launched years before),
lots of people jumped to the easier UI, and stopped calling WordPerfect.

A lesson here is that if you have to staff up to handle customer calls, there
is probably somebody out there who is going to disrupt your business if you
don't fix the problem.

------
dammitcoetzee
"While running a business profitably is arguably as difficult as any other
profession, almost anyone is allowed to give it a try, whether they are
qualified or not. It is like an inalienable right, available even to the
foolish, the young, and the senile." My favorite quote.

------
nradov
When WordPerfect built their first Windows version back in the early 1990s
they didn't even _try_ to make it look like other Windows applications. While
the UI might have been fine on it's own it looked bizarre next to every other
Windows app (not just other word processors). Some existing customers who were
used to the DOS version were willing to make the transition but they hardly
attracted any new customers.

The fact that Microsoft's Word developers were able to take advantage of
undocumented Windows APIs was also a factor, but a much smaller one. If
WordPerfect hadn't completely failed on the UI they might have at least had a
chance.

------
mmastrac
This was posted about five years ago, but it's a fantastic read full of great
lessons and worth having here again. Many of the lessons in this book showed
up as lean software development twenty years later, while the discussion on
funding is interesting to compare to today's situation.

------
aren55555
I attended grade school in Canada and I remember Corel's suite of productivity
software was what we were all taught in "computer" class.

