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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
At the very least, this suffers from false equivalence: clearly "running betting pools" and "selling Tupperware or Avon" (!) are not in same class as "going to a medical or dental appointment" or "running to the cafeteria for a snack". I think it's also somewhat dastardly that he's tacked on "griping about working conditions" and put it in same category as a personal indulgence that should not be enjoyed on "company time" -- it makes for an easy way of shutting down legitimate and constructive criticism.
In terms of how things have changed since WordPerfect: there is simply not the clearcut distinction between one's personal life and one's company life that there once was. This cuts both ways: yes, some "company time" is used for personal activities (like, um, eating), but plenty of formerly personal time is now used for the company. ("Dad: stop reading your e-mail!") The only path forward is to be reasonable adults about this: the world has become more complicated, and employees should strive to do right by the company -- and companies should strive to do right by employees. Flexibility and empathy are rewarded with increased productivity and improved morale; rigidity like that displayed here has been obsoleted.
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.
"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.
That passage doesn't rub me the wrong way at all. It is a clear set of statements. I don't have to belong to such a company, but if I did, at least I would know what the bounds were. At the start-ups I worked at, I saw a slippery slope of abuse of the "company culture."
Hm, in the UK when the world cup is on there is are betting pools ('fantasy football') in every office Ive ever worked in - so this is not as extreme behaviour as it first sounds.
I (briefly) worked for a company back in the mid 90s where pretty much any form of non-work interaction was frowned upon.
Having spent a couple of months in one of their offices where things weren't too bad, I was then relocated to a new team in their head office. On my first morning, I thought I'd be friendly and said hello to my new colleagues and asked how their weekends had been. I got a couple of brief "it was OK" type responses from them and they immediately put their heads back down into their work.
In the two weeks that I managed there before upping sticks and heading back to a previous company, that was probably the closest I got to a real conversation from anyone. It was the most soul destroying couple of weeks of my working life, and from the body language of the others there, I strongly suspect they felt the same about their job.
When I handed my notice in, I finally got several people commenting on how lucky I was to be getting out. I told them that there were plenty of jobs out there, and they were almost certainly better than this one.
I don't know whether it was connected, but in the months following my resignation, about half the team quit as well, prompting the CEO to start organising lunch sessions to find out why. One person told him honestly, and was promptly suspended.
As I said downthread, this was because they were a Orem, Utah company founded by BYU students that hired mostly BYU students. Thus, the culture isn't typical of software or even business culture of the 1980s, it was typical of Mormon culture. Very different.
Seems like a false correlation. Yes it was was Utah company founded by BYU students, but that is not the reason why/doesn't map cleanly to the culture. Culture comes in large part from founders and the first hires.
I understand that my comment sounded unnecessarily glib, and for that I apologize.
If you read the book, Peterson actually attributes the culture, especially early on (which as you said, is often set by the founders/first-hires, and while Peterson wasn't a co-founder, he was I think the first or second employee and related by marriage to a co-founder), to the fact that they were all conservative LDS types from Orem/Provo who graduated from BYU.
I certainly am not trying to say that ALL Utah businesses, all LDS businesses or all BYU grads in the 1980s or otherwise were like WordPerfect. That said, it would be silly to pretend that in this case, religion had no role in the culture (and Peterson outright said as much in his book, so this isn't even a debate point). To draw a parallel: I grew up in Atlanta, which is largely Protestant. Chick-fil-A is one of our staples , and as we all remember from the controversy a few years ago, a company VERY rooted in the whole Southern Baptist thing.
Put aside the whole same-sex marriage nastiness for a second (and trust me, as someone who loves Chick-fil-A, that pissed me the fuck off and made me very angry at the corporation), that company has a VERY distinct culture. Going beyond the whole closed on Sunday thing, people who worked there had to keep to a very specific set of standards while at work. To its credit, the company didn't enforce or try to push religious beliefs down employees throats (my boyfriend freshmen year who was a store manager was an atheist into industrial metal), but at work you couldn't wear certain kinds of clothing even underneath your work shirt. Guys couldn't wear hats backwards in the kitchen (seriously), shirts always have to be tucked in, there was a policy on language and what music could be played, even after hours (though as long as someone from corporate wasn't there, I think people get away with it), like, it's this whole thing. I tend to think some of that stuff gets kind of creepy, but to its credit, Chick-fil-A is probably the one fast food restaurant where the employees are competent and friendly 9/10. My point is that although I wouldn't brush all companies run by a Southern Baptist with the same brush, to ignore the role that that religion has had on Chick-fil-A's culture would be obtuse.
Similarly, to ignore the impact of a self-described conservative LDS hardliner from Orem/Provo had on the culture at WordPerfect is obtuse.
Certainly not all Utah or Mormon businesses have the same culture, but WordPerfect certainly seemed to ascribe to principals that are not at all at odds with what a hardline LDS guy born in the like 1950 would do.
A good counterexample would be Evans and Sutherland. David Evans was LDS, but fairly open; Sutherland would rib him about it in a joking way (e.g. see the LDS I [1]).
Of course, U of Utah is a bit more open than BYU :)
I don't understand. Your last sentence "Culture comes in large part from founders and first hires" seems to contradict the rest of your post, which seems to be arguing against the attribution of WordPerfect's culture to the specific culture background which unites its founders and first hires, but is distinct from the rest of the industry (or business more general) at the same time.
I found it interesting that in the paragraphs right after that, it's all about depending on employees to do the right thing, giving them trust and empowerment, and not micro-managing them. That part sounds more like GitHub or Valve than like 1980's IBM.
I'm not sure they actually managed to implement the culture as described, because after all, trying to change a company culture through a series of lunch lectures sounds remarkably unrealistic, but those values are very nice, and haven't really been superseded by any newer insight as far as I can tell.
And almost in direct conflict with the part you quote, but ok. Can't have it all :)
I found it interesting that in the paragraphs right after that, it's all about depending on employees to do the right thing, giving them trust and empowerment, and not micro-managing them.
That's what he says. Compare it to what he does: "For years I was the person most feared in the company. If I walked down a hallway, I was used to hearing the sound of desk drawers closing as people hid their snacks from view. If I attended a meeting, it was likely that at least a few of the people there were afraid to speak to me."
Lovely. I know the syndrome of ill-defined, perhaps unrealistic expectations, miscommunication, turf-building on the part of management, and you should run from it as fast as you can. The party line coming from your manager is that you are supposed to support the firm, but what you actually do in practice is support your manager in looking good. Everything is documented (you might get hit by a bus or get thrown under one), except the bossfellow's propietary systems.
Utah. Very strict Mormon background from the founders (and this dude who was the brother-in-law of one of the founders). It's like BYU but it's your workplace...
If you are ever in Provo I would love to give you a tour of BYU. BYU is not like this, not even back then. Seriously message me if you are ever in Utah, I'll show you the sights.
It's nice to have concepts like "don't take the piss and it's okay" but I'm not sure how well that scales when you have more than say 20 people. (I'm sure it can!) The elements of contagion are interesting. For example: Ann works hard, and starts her teabreak 5 minutes late. Reasonably, she takes an extra 5 minutes at the end of her teabreak. Bob sees her, and joins her, getting an extra 5 minutes. If this happens more than once or twice you risk complete breakdown in teabreaks, yet telling Ann to take her breaks on time means you're an asshole. (Before you mention the ridiculousness of teabreaks they're needed in some industries. You can't drink or eat at electronic manufacturing workstations.)
A local aeronautics company (Smiths Industries) has a start time for some worker of 8:43 am.
This is rigorously enforced not just by management but by your fellow workers on the shop floor.
It is baffling how such work-cultures develop. The few times I visited I didn't see much work getting done. I saw lots of people who didn't appear to be doing anything when I saw them. (There are plenty of reasons why, not just worker laziness - maybe the firm had just finished a large contract and a bunch of staff were about to be laid off, for example).
I worked in a small sub-contract electronic engineering factory for a few (maybe ten?) years, several years ago. The worst bosses have left that company and it's a long time ago so I'm always happy to talk about it. Especially our move from paper-based stock system to sage line 100; and our ISO900x joys.
So basically being a normal human being, that is not a good enough soulless drone for the benefit of shareholders, was totally out of the question. Sounds like a "perfect" place to work.
I worked for two startups in the late eighties and early nineties; both located in downtown Palo Alto. When recruiting, would tell candidate thats being downtown made it easy to run errands, lunch at great restaurants, take a quick afternoon bike ride around the Alpine loop, pop out to do some birthday or holiday shopping, walk to the bank, dentist, doctor, etc.
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.
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.
Borland's Turbo C (and presumably Turbo Pascal) used WordStar keybindings too. Nowadays I use JOE (Joe's Own Editor) which is a programmer's text editor with WordStar keybindings.
Thanks for making teenager me feel vindicated! I still get nostalgia when I think of gray on blue text screens. The keybidings and menues were really easy to pick up compared with WP.
Somewhat related, I remember typesetting some project/essays in junior high-school on some DTP software on the Amiga. I can't recall the name now, but I don't think it was PageStream that seems to be most popular google hit (and is apparently still available both for Amiga OS, Windows and Linux): http://www.pagestream.org/?id=1663
Whatever software it was, the printer driver managed to output quite readable black text on our 9-pin dot-matrix printer (at an excruciatingly slow rate -- I remember pulling an all-nighter -- having finished a 10-20 page report on, I think nuclear weapons/the attacks on Japan -- at around 06:00 in the morning -- and the printout taking close to three hours making me late for school ...).
What was great about that pice, was that it followed the pattern of most modern DTP packages, with content-boxes that allowed you to flow text through them. And let you write your actual text in a plain ("distraction free") editor. Much better than the "rich" word processors at the time.
I still think Adobe's CSS region proposal[1] sounds pretty good -- not really as an addition to traditional CSS (a language suitable for styling, but unsuitable for layout) -- but as a way to augment CSS and HTML to become a language more-suited to layout (not good, not great, just not horribly bad). Lie[2], doesn't think so, but I think his perspective is inaccurate on this one. His points are valid, but I don't think he's really addressing the correct issue. CSS columns is a technical way to break up text. Allowing text to flow into boxes allows keeping the text plain and simple (think a classic html3 document with only text) and the layout separate (the divs/boxes). Lie appears to think in terms of a object/hypertext/rich document -- but that kind of thinking leads to single page apps where you can't read a blog article with js disabled.
This and also Windows made more important the office suit.
Before Windows, integration between apps like WordPerfect, Lotus 123 or dBase wasn't so important, so you could buy each piece of software from a different vendor. Solid copy and paste between spreadsheet, word processor and presentation software was the killer feature of MS Office.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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,
In the DOS-days (before system-wide print drivers), WordPerfect's had a huge advantage in the form of it's printer support. I can see why the organization would have fought against switching to someone else's driver stack. (Not to mention the fact that replicating the format of WordPerfect-driver output with the Windows GDI, and its drivers would be very challenging, I'm sure.)
"IIRC ... Microsoft required computer manufacturers to purchase an Office license for every Windows license. As a result, every new computer came with Office installed."
I think you recall incorrectly. I bought a couple of computers in the early 90s and neither came with Office installed. Admittedly this was in the home and small business market rather than enterprise -- it's true that Microsoft pushed Office harder into the enterprise market, but I still don't recall an antitrust suite over Office bundling, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_litigation#United_Sta... doesn't mention an antitrust suit over Office bundling. You may be thinking of the allegations that Microsoft withheld details of Windows APIs:
"The Novell v. Microsoft case was a complaint about Microsoft deliberately withholding Windows technical information in order to thwart its competitors in the applications market. The case brought to light an Oct. 3, 1994 memo from then-Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who indicated that Microsoft should withhold namespace extension APIs in Windows 95 from its competitors, WordPerfect and IBM, in order to gain market advantage for Microsoft Word."
> I bought a couple of computers in the early 90s and neither came with Office installed.
I thought it happened later, maybe with Windows 95. I wasn't thinking of the Novell suit, which I'm aware of. However, I'm still not sure I recalled correctly, though I'd be surprised if I remember something that didn't exist at all.
It has been a while, but I remember my first experience with WP on Windows as not very good. I am a slow typist, and could get ahead of the cursor: it always felt spongy.
Last winter I had a legal secretary ask me to help her convert a document to PDF. Gee, Molly, I said, Word 2010 and up saves PDF as one of its built-in options. No, she said, this is WordPerfect. She then demonstrated to me how the table layout was slightly munged when she converted it to Word. She has since retired, but I bet her old boss hasn't given up WP.
> Last winter I had a legal secretary ask me to help her convert a document to PDF. Gee, Molly, I said, Word 2010 and up saves PDF as one of its built-in options. No, she said, this is WordPerfect.
She must have had a very old version of WordPerfect. It's been able to not only create but edit PDFs for years, much longer than Word.
Heh, indeed. Except I've never found Word for Windows anything less than rock solid, perhaps I missed an iffy version. But I do remember buying 1.0 or slightly later way back when, and using many versions since then. Not a program I use regularly, but when I do rather heavily, e.g. for documentation, it was rock solid by the summer of 1994.
A few people I knew swore by WordPerfect, because it had the most features of the editors known around here. I really dreaded trying to navigate its menues and figuring out why things were buggy. It was a bit frustrating back then, because I thought maybe I was just having a mental block with it. Fortunately, I had WordStar and loved it so much I didn't ever really miss WP, but still took me a few years to understand there was such a thing as software hype.
That's funny you mention the lawyer thing. My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs, and even Word, but he still swears by his WordPerfect (and now that I think about he still uses AOL). I didn't read through the manuscript but I'm curious ifWP targeted lawyers back in the day.
> My dad is a lawyer and his firm still uses it today. I've shown him Google Docs
I'm wondering if a lawyer's use of Google Docs or other web-based document storage app would be considered a breach of client privacy or violation of some confidentiality laws?
Yes, I know that lawyers (and doctors, etc.) use email, but email is at least 30 years older than could-based apps like Google Docs, so more allowance has been made for it. In other words, a lawyer might fear getting into trouble for using web-based storage, but won't fear sending the same thing by email.
Yes, I also know that proper use of cryptography can solve all of these issues, but we all know that virtually no lawyer (or doctor or similar professional) ever uses encryption.
The reveal codes feature in WordPerfect probably had something to do with its initial popularity because it helped you to be sure that there wasn't text hidden in the document. That said, I expect that, at a time when there were a lot of different word processors out there, WordPerfect gained a foothold at law firms for at least somewhat accidental reasons. At which point document compatibility made it somewhat of a standard in the profession. (It also ran on quite a few different systems as I recall, so many firms may well have run it on the minicomputers that they were also using for other purposes.)
I never much cared for it myself but a former employers sold quite a bit of it (on minicomputers) to law forms.
> The reveal codes feature in WordPerfect probably had something to do with its initial popularity because it helped you to be sure that there wasn't text hidden in the document.
Reveal codes is essentially your browser's view source command, but with interactive editing (i.e., with live update of the WYSIWYG output). I never heard of it being used to check for hidden text, though I suppose that's possible. It is used to address formatting issues -- those annoying situations where the word processor is doing something unexpected, or if you want to know if the empty space is a set of spaces or a tab.
Reveal codes is why I'm convinced that my mother, who finds using a mouse difficult, never mind mysteriously-worded dialogue boxes and context-shifting menu ribbons, would have been quite happy authoring web pages in the era before font tags became unfashionable.
Its funny, I can think of very few obvious advances in word processors since the mid-90s, but loss of Reveal Codes is a definite backward step from WordPerfect for DOS, which is probably the first piece of software I ever used.
My dad is also a lawyer and is extremely sad about the demise of WP. I wonder if there's something about the feature set that makes it good for lawyers.
I worked as an IT person for a fairly big law firm in the summer of 1989, and as a part time contractor during the rest of the year and early 1990. It was an all WordPerfect shop, with a Novell Netware LAN. :)
I'm not sure about the feature set, but WordPerfect was once very wildly popular in the corporate world in general, not only in law firms! In the late 1980's, word processing on a DOS PC pretty much meant WordPerfect; it was the leading product.
And, of course, lawyers produce reams of documents, which usually have to stick around for a long time. So they don't like converting documents from one form to another; of course they will gripe about the demise of software.
A document produced by a lawyer in 1990 might still need to be accessible today. A memo produced by some random manager in some random corporation produced in 1990 is probably long forgotten.
Some old-time ex-users of WordPerfect will tend to bring up the "Reveal Codes" function. Wordperfect documents had a kind of markup language consisting of codes; and you could drop into that level to see how some markup (like bold, italics or whatever) is really represented, and fix it.
"A related factor is that WordPerfect Corporation was particularly responsive to feature requests from the legal profession, incorporating many features particularly useful to that niche market and those features have been continued in subsequent versions usually directly accessible with key combinations."
Reveal Codes was my favourite WordPerfect feature. (I'm not a lawyer though.) It wasn't so much that it revealed how things are represented, because the coding was simplistic enough that there wasn't any real underlying representation as such separate from the document formatting - it simply told you where regions of one style began an ended. Like looking at an HTML document in View Source mode. You could have half the display dedicated to Reveal Codes, as I recall, and edit in either mode as you went along (a bit like Dreamweaver). Made it super-easy to keep things in line.
Word, by contrast, makes it very unclear where one format begins and the next ends, meaning it's all too easy to make a mess. (Back when I still used Word, though maybe they've fixed it by now, it was very common for the space after the last character in a page before a manual page break to have the format of the following page, for example! Caused havoc when trying to style the last sentence...)
Reveal Codes was well implemented from a usability perspective. Ordinary non-programming people like office secretaries understood and liked Reveal Codes: they could "get under the hood" of the document without learning a markup language, and understand the mess they made with multiple layers of overlapping formatting and whatnot.
I actually preferred wordstar (though I was 9 at the time so my opinion is suspect) I still remember writing "Things that Might Have Killed the Dinosaurs" on an XT Clone in (oh god) '89.
I used Wordstar by means of a Z80 coprocessor card plugged into my Apple II+ clone, which enabled it to run the CP/M operating system. In elementary school and high school, I used Wordstar for essays and term papers. I used WordPerfect at university, but ditched word processors forever after seeing a presentation lecture about LaTeX.
> ditched word processors forever after seeing a presentation lecture about LaTeX.
ITYM "ditched non-Latex word processors"? It's not as though Latex creators don't use software that in many ways resembles conventional word processors.
I've been told by layers that WP got the word count feature right at a time when MS Word often didn't. Apparently, certain aspects of the profession demand that some documents don't go above a limit. As I understood it - if they do, then the document can be thrown out by the opposing side.
Part of it was their existing base of WP template documents. They could charge hundreds of dollars for a filing or demand document that was nothing more than a mail-merge.
Both WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3 faced some of the same sorts of issues in the early 80's, and both product teams made choices that left them unable to respond effectively to Windows.
To set the context, rewind the clock back to 1987. (Bear with me here.)
In 1987, the IBM PC (running DOS) is well established as the dominant business personal computer. However, thanks to the easy availability of Microsoft's DOS, and the almost completely open hardware design, a huge array of PC clone vendors has effectively taken over the market. In 1987, the clone vendors own the low end on price and own the high end on performance. (Compaq beat IBM to shipping an 80386 based machine by a year or so, and the Deskpro 386 was three times faster than IBM's best PC AT). IBM has effectively completely lost control of the market they started.
To respond, IBM develops a completely new line of PC's, the PS/2, and works with Microsoft to build the next generation OS: OS/2. OS/2 is intended to be the first mainstream multitasking, protected memory OS for personal computers. The combination of the two is supposed to advance the state of the art so far, that (in combination with IBM's proprietary bus license) the clone vendors will be completely shut down and unable to compete. Both IBM and Microsoft convince the ISV's that OS/2 is the wave of the future and where new platform investments should be made, instead of Windows. Both Lotus and WordPerfect release all sorts of cross platform versions of their flagship products (VMS, SCO Unix, NeXT, etc.... everything but Windows, because it's obsolete.)
By the time 1989-90 rolls around, it's pretty clear that IBM's strategy has fallen apart. The machines are too expensive, not compatible enough, and the features that customers actually care about (VGA, etc.) are all available on cheaper/faster clone machines. OS/2 has also fallen short because it's expensive and requires special software to work as it should. (For existing DOS software, old OS/2 was a major step backwards).
Into this chaos, David Weise and Murray Sargent, both of the Microsoft Windows team come up with a way to run existing Windows applications in protected mode. (This is a non-management supported skunkworks project... MS management was still behind OS/2 at the time.)
What winds up happening is IBM and Microsoft split up their partnership, and Microsoft charges forward with protected mode Windows, in the form of Windows 3.0. Windows, always cheaper than OS/2, now contains all of the important OS/2 features and works better than OS/2 for your existing DOS programs. Basically in an instant, the entire momentum of the industry went from trying to figure out how to make OS/2 work to a wholesale adoption of Windows. The ISV's had to respond in turn.
For Microsoft, this was easy... they'd always been on Windows, mainly because they had to. For everybody else who'd been driving to OS/2, it was a major change in priorities. API's were different, the graphics model was different, in some cases, companies had to switch to GUI's from CLI's... I don't think it was premeditated, but the change in platforms ave Microsoft a huge advantage that they absolutely jumped on.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.