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.
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.
Most people who aren't in the tech just launch a word processor (word, libreoffice, etc.)
Tech people on Windows use Notepad or a similar GUI program.
Vim is used by a tiny, tiny fraction of people in the world.
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.
There are a couple of gems (netsh for example), but commandline on Windows is just painful.
Powershell does give you a lot more potential, but I've found its syntax to be too verbose to be a comfortable commandline replacement.
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.
Tech people on Windows use Notepad++ when they can.
Vim is rarely used outside of editing config files on appliances.
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.
And a compare plugin does exist as well, it's functional.
With its focus on the mouse and GUI slowness, Word was a very painful transition and productivity drain for them.
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.
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.
Are they? Based on my totally unscientific observations vi(m)s popularity has dropped over the past 15-20 years
P.S. I love vim but I love it enough to recognise flaws.
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.
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
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-...