Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 5, 2016 17:54 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice by pboddie
Parent article: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

WordPerfect dominated the DOS era - and was ported TO dos (amongst others) from Data General. I wrote a load of stuff on WP/SCO. And between 1994 and 1996 WP *doubled* its market share from 20% to 40%. So how come it was such a turkey on Windows?

Like so many other products, it was sabotaged by MS. Being first or last is irrelevant. Being a proponent of the American "dirty tricks" school of capitalism seems to be a pretty good tactic (unless you're a European company - the European courts tend to take a far stronger line against it).

Cheers,
Wol

Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 10, 2016 1:07 UTC (Sat) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link] (1 responses)

Actually, WordPerfect was sabotaged by a combination of their own not-so-competent management and IBM's politics (which tricked them into investing a lot in WP for OS/2, instead of in a version for Windows); Microsoft had relatively little to do with that, except that they profited massively from WordPerfect's judgement error.

Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 14, 2016 18:22 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

No. I think you will find that upgrades to Windows actively sabotaged WordPerfect.

Given that WP was the dominant word processor on DOS, do you *really* think it likely that M$ would ship an update to Win3.1 that would reliably break it?

Or ship an office suite that would reliably kill a pre-installed WordPerfect stone dead?

That's not anecdotes. That's personal experience. I could predictably kill WordPerfect by installing an M$ update. And as I say - they were the dominant word processor at the time. I can't believe that was an accident ...

And if you read the court case, it is very clear that M$'s communications with WordPerfect Corp over Win95 were absolutely full of porkies. "WordPerfect for Win95" relied heavily on functionality that was in the beta copies of 95, but was pulled for the release version! Which is probably why MS Office was so full of back doors - maybe it was this code that was moved into Office rather than Windows, or maybe the Office team were "encouraged" not to use the official API precisely because M$ senior management were planning this "bait and switch" for a long time. Unfortunately, Novell waited for the Netscape trial to finish before pressing their own claims, and got timed out. They should have opened the case and asked the Judge to toll it until the DoJ case finished.

Cheers,
Wol