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Irony of the skeletons still rattling in Microsoft cupboards
Microsoft simply can't shake off its past. The US Supreme Court has denied a request by the company to drop an anti-trust suit filed by Novell in 1994 alleging anti-competitive behaviour by Microsoft 10 years previously. Curiously, Novell is now under fire for cosying up to Microsoft over reconciling the competing ODF and OpenXML formats.
Whatever the merits or otherwise of this claim, WordPerfect's problems began far earlier. Its glory days were when PCs were largely text based, and its hotkey-based interface became a de facto standard, rather as the classic Word formats are today.
WordPerfect's formats were actually better, in that they were more understandable by non-specialists; and to this day Word has not managed to match its old rival's Reveal Codes feature (though this could easily be implemented with Word 2007's new Open XML formats).
The Word Perfect Office suite was phenomenal, running a personal information manager, spreadsheet, word processor, and macro editor back to back in 640KB of RAM.
That simply could not be done when graphical interfaces came in. Some people still swear by the first pre-Windows graphical version of Word Perfect – version 5.0, as I recall. Personally, I stuck with the text-based version 4.2 because it was far faster. The fact is that PCs (and Macs) of those days did not have the legs to run a graphical interface comfortably.
The first Word Perfect for Windows, which I reviewed, was flaky as well as very sluggish compared with Microsoft Word. There were claims at the time that Microsoft was using secret programming 'hooks' to allow its own applications run faster in the Windows environment.
But even without such chicanery, Microsoft was bound to have had an edge because its applications programmers were, so to speak, working on home territory. And Windows itself eliminated two of WordPerfect's great advantages: the familiarity of its hotkeys, and its vast array of printer drivers. In pre-Windows days, remember, each application needed its own drivers.
So the irony is that any Microsoft skulduggery over WordPerfect would have been pointless. Word would probably have won anyway.
Posted by Clive Akass on March 19, 2008 | Permalink
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