>> they out Advertised or eventually caught up and passes you (Word Perfect).
WordPerfect kind of killed itself. They never embraced the GUI because they thought Windows was ugly. The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. They were all over the map trying to make a suite of strange, semi-office-related programs.
When they went from 4.x to 5.0 they had to re-do the printer driver model, just as Windows was making specific dos printer drivers for your application obsolete.
>> The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics.
It's kind of ironic how nowadays I prefer using Vim for coding and other tasks. And I also find myself preferring Markdown more and more whenever I can for a variety of tasks, from planning meetings to preparing presentations.
I remember talking to some very unhappy legal secretaries way back then when they were forced to switch from WordPerfect to Word. They used WordPerfect day in and day out and were very efficient at it's keystroke commands and loved it because it was fast.
With its focus on the mouse and GUI slowness, Word was a very painful transition and productivity drain for them.
Mouse is always easier for new users to learn. Keyboard is always faster for trained users and anywhere with tight processing performance metrics you'll see almost exclusively-keyboard users.
Ironically, a lot of users still prefer mainframe applications over newer GUIs for the same reason.
Source: I've worked for quite a few "on the floor" user processing centers for various types of data. 30s-2min per work item type of stuff.
But at least part of that resistance was the tech version of Stockholm Syndrome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome). They didn't love WordPerfect because it was better than Word, they loved WordPerfect because it was what they already knew and they had invested a lot of time in learning its idiosyncrasies. Moving to Word meant throwing all that learning out and having to start learning all over again, which they (quite naturally) didn't want to do. But none of that means that WordPerfect was a superior product; it really wasn't, especially for new users. It just means that people who were heavily invested in WordPerfect -- and there were a lot of those people back then -- didn't want that investment to have been for nothing.
Microsoft addressed this issue quite effectively by providing a mode in early versions of Word that supported all of WordPerfect's key bindings. This let those hard-core WordPerfect users ease into the new application without having to learn a whole new way of working. Over time they discovered how much easier it was to use the mouse and WIMP interface, so the WordPerfect compatibility mode became less and less of a selling point. But at the beginning it was absolutely crucial to selling Word into organizations that had been bastions of WordPerfect use.
I think a lot of people are using vim emulators that bring the modal concept and keybindings in other software. Maybe NeoVim will eventually change this once vim can be embedded in a decent GUI and have addons that don't slow the how thing down to a crawl.
P.S. I love vim but I love it enough to recognise flaws.
I'm always horrified to see this. MS really shot themselves in the foot with the dev community by not providing a powerful text editor as the default. Getting a WinAdmin to enjoy the UNIX'y way of doing things is like trying to feed a child broccoli.
On one hand, it's almost a C#/CLR REPL with amazing power to program and script almost anything you could think of, but on the other it's not a shell and anyone coming from *nix that tries to think like a shell will be sorely disappointed in how verbose and unintuitive it behaves.
This. Notepad++ has been my goto for years. It's tabbed, it does some highlighting. Opens literally anything. I've never wanted for more than Notepad++ offers by default. And if I did... there's plugins.
I know a bunch of people who swear by UltraEdit too. I think Notepad++ vs. UltraEdit is like the far tamer Windows version of Vim vs. Emacs.
ViEmu adds Vim to Office (Word/Outlook, SQL Server Management Studio, and Visual Studio. I wouldn't ever consider using a source editor without Vim support now (I started a few years ago and am amazed how awesome Vim is.)
Netscape vs Internet Explorer (MS just gave the browser away for free) For a good 6 months Netscape was out "selling" IE but eventually IE won the war for a good 15 years.
> Fifteen months ago, the Redmond giant decided to get serious about the Internet. Never too proud to imitate a competitor's success, Microsoft issued its own browser, the Microsoft Explorer, offered it for free over the Net, made deals to ship it with new computers and versions of America Online and CompuServe, and vowed to build Web-browsing into its Windows operating system and business software. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=199...
Let's not forget that IE was actually a bought product by MS:
> The first iteration of the Internet Explorer platform shipped on August 16, 1995 but was essentially a rehash for an existing product called Spyglass Mosaic which Microsoft had licensed. IE was originally shipped to retail as part of the “Internet Jumpstart Kit” but could also be pre-installed with a new Windows 95 PC. http://www.neowin.net/news/internet-explorer-version-1-10-a-...
IE4 came out in Sept 1997 vs August 1995 IE. IE4 was the first time that IE was bundled with Windows. There was a ton of development with a huge IE development to catch up and eventually surpass Netscape.
FUNNY IE 4 release story:
> In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read "From the IE team ... We Love You". The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18" representing the market distribution. http://home.snafu.de/tilman/mozilla/stomps.html
microsoft publisher - licensed from the authors, rebranded, then given away killing the entire windows market for the original product on windows or any other platform
WordPerfect kind of killed itself. They never embraced the GUI because they thought Windows was ugly. The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. They were all over the map trying to make a suite of strange, semi-office-related programs.
When they went from 4.x to 5.0 they had to re-do the printer driver model, just as Windows was making specific dos printer drivers for your application obsolete.