by russellbeattie | 2025-04-01 22:17:36+00:00
The reason for the horrible Windows version was threefold: 1) Culture, 2) Hubris and 3) OS/2.

From Almost Perfect [1], the book linked to in the article:

> 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.

Sounds like a lovely place to work! Oof. Compare this to Apple or Microsoft or a ton of other Silicon Valley companies. It's no wonder they couldn't find developers:

> In January [1990] Microsoft offered to make us a beta test site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to see we should have done much more right away. At the time, we could justify not doing a Windows 2.0 version in favor of completing WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, but it is now difficult to defend our further delays. Unfortunately, we did not have any experienced Windows programmers inside the company to form a development team, and there were not many outside the company to recruit.

> In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

> May 31, 1990 was a sad day in WordPerfect Corporation's history. I wrote a press release announcing that we were postponing our OS/2 product, so we could produce a Windows version of WordPerfect as quickly as possible. I wrote, "While we still are strong supporters of OS/2, we have decided to test and release the Windows version of WordPerfect before the OS/2 version. The reasons for the schedule change have to do with the expected delays in version 2.0 of Presentation Manager and particular requests from our customers. This change should move up the release of our Windows product by three to four months and will delay our release of a PM product by four or five months."

The book is free online and pretty interesting if you like histories of early computing. It's definitely on the list with the more famous ones like Soul of a New Machine.

1. http://www.wordplace.com/ap/