Every one of those cited companies crushed themselves first. Lotus followed the common pattern of burning out and losing their technical talent after they first shipped, also made too large a bet on OS/2. Ashton-Tate did a little better maybe but also lost its ability to write software that worked, which was much more difficult back in those days. Borland and WordPerfect found it much more difficult than they expected to transition their products to Windows 3.x.

The latter had too much pride in their collection of DOS printer drivers, but what really killed them was releasing something that passed the bar of not crashing, but would per a lawyer I worked with regularly drop all your tables and figures to the bottom of the document. Borland was slow to get their stuff working on Windows, was late to bundling an Office equivalent according to a marketing guy from there I once worked with, and had the bad portent of the edifice complex: http://www.krjda.com/Sites/BorlandInfo1.html

To this day, well it's after they started going beyond their start in computer languages, their 808x C compiler for example blew away the competition when it finally launched, we ding Microsoft for their quality problems, but especially in the days Gates ran it one of the "secrets" of their success was writing software that basically worked, didn't crash on you etc. This makes it easy to beat competitors who lose that ability, or aren't as good at it.