Almost perfect: the rise and fall of WordPerfect Corporation (1993)
wordplace.com
wordplace.com
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.
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.
fwiw
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?
Edit: grammar.
> Even though these activities were condoned by many businesses across the country ...
They were an outlier even then.
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.
"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.
I stand by my assessment of an asshole that pitches tantrums if people eat at their desk (while presumably working!)
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 :)
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.
The chap preaches water and drinks wine.
Hm... the Family and Medical Leave Act is from 1993, so maybe this was legal back then. I seriously doubt it is now.
griping about working conditions
This sounds dangerously close to forbidding the initial steps of labor organization. Which also sounds like the sort of thing that would be illegal.
> WordPerfect Corporation was not intended to be a social
> club for the unproductive.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.
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.
Of course, U of Utah is a bit more open than BYU :)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS-1_(Line_Drawing_System-1)
Could you, perhaps, clarify?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/05/14/george_r_...
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.
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-regions/
[2] http://alistapart.com/blog/post/css-regions-considered-harmf...
She didn't change ^K^B, I still remember that one.
I had to learn WordPerfect in High School and hated the clunky command codes and the keyboard overlays required to make sense of it all.
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.
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.
(The included docs mention a terminal version of WP 8, but, sadly, it doesn't exist...)
Version 9 onwards used WINE.
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.
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.
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.
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Reveal_codes
Oh, and there are some clues in the same page about the connection between the legal world and WordPerfect:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect#Faithful_customers
"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."
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...)
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 never much cared for it myself but a former employers sold quite a bit of it (on minicomputers) to law forms.
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.
All versions of WordPerfect for Windows had and have Reveal codes. Word on the other hand ...
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.
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.
But WordPerfect had some spectacular failures and the buggyness of WP for Windows was a factor in their death.
Grossman was writing a blog before there were blogs. He was a lawyer of some kind working for a government agency in Chicago.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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."
http://redmondmag.com/articles/2014/04/28/court-nixes-novell...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2005/02/02/365...
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.
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.
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.
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.