
Almost Perfect - The Rise and Fall of WordPerfect - soundsop
http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml
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shaunxcode
Wow I am stoked to read this. I grew up in the shadow of
wordperfect/corel/novel and always imagined I would end up working for one of
them. The first "hacking" I ever did was in jr high when I finally got to mess
with computers all day - which had been donated by wordperfect and thus
permanently shined with the blue of wp5. At 16 I got my CNA and landed a job
at novel, however after starting to sign papers they informed me you had to be
18. Great. Changed my mind, traveled the world, lived in england, fell in love
with programming, ended up back in utah valley 6 years later. Actually worked
as a developer for a company that was in the first novel building down by
geneva steel and later with another company at what was the wordperfect
complex.

Now I realize the future I always imagined working for one of these companies
is only going to come from creating it myself. It's interesting that his story
starts with a recession forcing his hand into innovating.

I wouldn't normally make a long winded "personal" post on hn but I figured no
one else is really going to care about word perfect history so I may as well
give my two cents for posterity. Anyway back to building the dream - what else
are weekends for?

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ojbyrne
Novell? Also isn't Corel in a completely different part of the world (Ottawa,
Canada) than Wordperfect/Novell (Utah)?

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shaunxcode
Good call on the typo - and Corel bought Word Perfect at some point or the
merged/regurgitated into each other how ever you want to look at it.

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ojbyrne
Sure, just that the way you phrased it ("in the shadow of") suggests that
Corel was in Utah.

~~~
shaunxcode
Oh I should have made that more clear. Corel was in utah (well a division of
it at least) after they merged/bought word perfect. They basically changed the
name on the business park to Corel and went about business as usual. And when
I say in the shadow of I mean both figuratively and literally as the business
park sat up on the hill overlooking my jr high and it felt like that was my
destiny if I didn't want to work at Geneva Steel. Oddly I did work down by
geneva steel as a vw mechanic before delving into computers full time.

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plinkplonk
From the book

"Near the end of the first lecture, I explained what WordPerfect Corporation
was not. This set the stage for the next two days, when I would explain what
WordPerfect Corporation was.

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."

While all this can be justified, why would anyone want to work at a compnay
like this?

I found this interesting since most companies these days at least pretend to
do many of these things in order to attract and retain a talented workforce.
There is no mention of any ESOP like scheme either. But WP made a lot of money
so they must have done something right and hired at least a few good people.

Maybe the eighties was just a different time.

~~~
JulianMorrison
Was their product a Good Hack?

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ckinnan
From the book:

"Sadly for Micropro, the one thing they could not do very easily was update
their product. After their luck at getting the CP/M version of WordStar
running on the PC, they could not seem to get an updated version out the door.
They decided instead that they would produce an entirely new product, one
which was easier to maintain and improve than the original version.

Luckily for us, the new WordStar, introduced at COMDEX as WordStar 2000, was
entirely different from the old product. Micropro intentionally attempted to
replace their market leader with a product that was bigger and slower and used
a different interface. Although it was not obvious at COMDEX, the product was
doomed from the start. In spite of all the product hype and the size and
beauty of the Micropro booth and presentation, the new product did not stand a
chance.

Micropro did more for us at that show than we could ever have done for
ourselves. They convinced their customers that the old WordStar was not very
good and that they needed to look for something better. Not only would these
customers take a look at WordStar 2000, but they would also look at
WordPerfect 4.0."

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wyclif
WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. Still the gold standard word processor. Alt- & Ctrl-
keystroke macro libraries, and remapping any key as a macro:

<http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/>

~~~
chaosmachine
I remember running WordPerfect 5.1 on an 8mhz 8086 with 640k of ram. Amazing
achievement considering the multi-gigabyte bloatware suites of today.

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dchest
I read this book twice, and I highly recommend it for everyone in software
business. It's incredibly interesting and useful.

~~~
icefox
What exactly do you recommend about it? I spent the evening reading it and can
only conclude that they were really lucky and nothing more. They had a product
that wasn't half bad (though the author likes to point out time and time again
about the bugs, issues and outright problems) combined with the fall of all of
their competitors makes for a lot of being in the right place at the right
time. They have near zero ability to create new products other then by luck.
They waste money left and right. They live through their major competitor
loosing because they fail to transition to a new platform and only shortly
after do the exact same thing learning nothing. The guy goes on and on about
how to best run a company only to discover that no one listened to him and
that was not how the company actually ran. They didn't kill unprofitable
projects, watch where money went, and the author gives the impression that
they didn't seem to properly invest in real products or ideas. He briefly
mentions highering bright students and a few minor things, but most of the
book doesn't mention that much about the development practices good or bad.
For having a single product be such a cash cow you would think year after year
they would try to improved their development and learn from their mistakes,
but there is no mention of it. Also very little is mentioned of who the leads
of development were as time went on as though developers don't really matter
as long as you have some. For the main product that you live and die on you
would think more attention would be spent on it. You can have horrible
customer support if your software is fantastic. The lesson I got out of it
would be to always consider the worse case. Although they wanted OS/2 to win
if Windows won the worst case is that they would loose their cash cow. They
should have started as soon as possible even if it meant paying a dozen
developers on a dead end project. Heck start two completing sub companies to
make a windows word perfect and pick the winner after X months, they had the
money. With the extra money they should have taken their time on making new
products doing it right rather then rushing out dozens of toy applications.
New applications didn't need twenty languages and fancy boxes and manuals.
Push it out there and see what worked, kill what didn't. It was only the luck
of all the money of WP that allowed all of the mistake after mistake to be
tried. Once DOS was over it was no surprise that it went south. I would much
rather recommend a book less on luck and more on doing the right things as you
will get a lot more out of it.

~~~
dchest
_I would much rather recommend a book less on luck and more on doing the right
things as you will get a lot more out of it._

"Doing right things"/success story books won't teach you about mistakes they
made. You better learn how you can fail, because you _can_ repeat failure, but
you probably will _not_ repeat success by using the same methods as in success
story books.

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amichail
Anyone remember SpeedScript?

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpeedScript>

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adamsmith
If anyone wants to save five minutes and use the PDF I put together to send to
my kindle, email me at adam at viratech dot c-o-m!

~~~
allenbrunson
there is already a pdf of the book on the linked site. how is yours better or
different? i'm not a kindle user, so i don't know the details.

~~~
idiopathic
Kindle does not read PDF as a native format. Instead, you can send the file as
an attachment to a kindle email address and Amazon's server converts it into
the azw (originally mobipocket) format. This the file on offer and getting it
direct saves five minutes. (Thanks for the offer!)

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alain94040
The irony of course is that the site has Google ads all over, and they all
push Microsoft Word...

Anyway, I'd like to hear the story of how the book rights went back to the
author, that's unusual.

~~~
dchest
I don't see irony here. The book describes the rise and _fall_ of WordPerfect.
The final part is about, as you can guess, losing to Word.

~~~
dinkumthinkum
Right, I think that is called "evidence" rather than irony. :)

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PostOnce
Only within the past two years have the Florida courts begun supporting MS
Word. My mom still writes all her briefs in WordPerfect. It's the only place I
know that uses it, but there are probably other government agencies.

Also, speaking of word processors, does anyone else here use Write Room/Dark
Room/JDarkRoom or similar?

~~~
dinkumthinkum
You're right, lawyers use WordPerfect like nobody's business. I've met many
lawyers that don't even know Microsoft Word exists.

