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Comment by scholia | Hacker News Reader

So, you'd learn something if you actually read the story ;-)

"Two months before the public offering in 1984 disaster struck Rubenstein. Not someone who anyone would describe as low-key, Rubenstein suffered a heart attack. Back in 1980 or so he made the mistake of bringing in a venture capitalist who was introduced to Rubenstein by Rubenstein’s brother’s brother-in-law. That kind of combination had the words “bad idea” written all over it. “It was the biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” says Rubenstein. The guy was Fred Adler who sent Fred Haney into Seymour’s hospital room with a document that Seymour had to sign converting all his stock into non-voting stock “or the public offering would be killed.” Rubenstein who still shudders when he thinks of his brush with death says he was so frightened by the heart attack that he wasn’t in the mood to argue with anyone about anything. From that moment the company lost its edge. Haney, an ex-Sperry-Univac guy took over as CEO at Adlers request."

That is some Kenn Viselman grade scumbaggery.

How is forcing the guy to sign away his voting rights while he was in the hospital legal? I am definitely not a lawyer, but I thought contracts signed under duress aren't enforceable. Could a good lawyer have gotten that contract nullified?

> How is forcing the guy to sign away his voting rights while he was in the hospital legal?

Well, the concern from the standpoint of the other parties would that he would die, and his voting rights pass on to someone completely non-technical and/or non-entrepreneurial. I can see that it makes perfect sense to protect themselves against that eventuality.

Maybe it'd be better to have terms to convert to non-voting shares at death or permanent incapacity, with voting rights to be exercised in proportion to the other votes cast during temporary incapacity. But that could definitely get hairy too.

Being in a hospital isn't duress. Threatening to put someone in the hospital is duress. He might have had a lack of capacity argument, that is he was so out of his mind that he was unable to sign a contract, but I am not sure if that applies either.

Putting the high stress squeeze on someone with a life-threatening condition that's exacerbated by stress is in fact extreme duress and coercion.

"He made the mistake of bringing in a [singular] venture capitalist" and it didn't work out. This isn't "murdered by VC's".

"Microsoft Word ate the remains" is still wrong ;-)

I was already aware of the VC angle before making the first comment, as far as I can see they had a very active role in bringing wordstar down (you can debate if that qualifies as murder or not) and if you disagree with that Microsoft Word successfully eradicated the remains of wordstar (and many other word processors of the day) I'm perfectly OK with that it just does not match my recollection of the events at the time.

Most everyone I know was switching from WordStar to WordPerfect at the time. Microsoft Word came much later for me.

One day it was all Wang dedicated word processors, the next it was all Microsoft Word.

Of course this very much depends on what you were doing at the time, but MS was pushing very hard to establish their 'office' products.

The turning point was 1989, with Windows just barely being usable, then 3.0 came out and it went very quickly.

It also heavily depends on where you were - in some countries, it was a loooong time of nothing and then MS Word. Nearly 30 years of MS Word to date and no signs of any competition, actually...

I haven't touched a microsoft product in a decade now. Which leads to fun stuff when family wants me to look at their computers and I can now honestly say I have no clue how the current version of windows works.

That was what generally happened. Microsoft Word (for DOS) never got much traction, while Word Perfect (for DOS) mostly replaced WordStar (on CP/M and DOS). Word (for Windows) started to take over after Windows 3 came out in 1990.....

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