Re: OT: Death To Word, Final Word

["Kari Eveli" lexitec@xxxxxxxx]

>It would be interesting to find out why Word came to dominance (not over XyWrite, but over other comparable editors). My shaky hypothesis is that its due to the herd mentality of bureaucratized corporations. Or is there some feature of word that makes it, for some use, superior to, say, Word Perfect?

WordPerfect did not quite make it to the Windows platform. First versions were shaky, MS used better
routines in its own software and preached a different programming approach to other players trying
to port their applications from DOS to Windows. If you own the standard, you have a distinct
advantage over the competition. As Windows became the dominant platform, WordPerfect lost more of
its corporate appeal (WordPerfect was multiplatform: *nix versions, Mac, Data General, OS/2, etc.).

Classic DOS MS-Word was very good for business correspondence and the like, albeit slow and clunky
compared to XyWrite. I have used DOS Word from version 2 onwards. Versions 4 and 5 had great device
support, which must be been extremely useful as a code base when building up Windows device support.
While the initial Word for Windows version was not very good, it was better than the then
market-leading WordPerfect's efforts. The trick was in the interaction between the application and
the operating system. This proved to be a stumbling block for the XyWrite port to Windows, too.
Windows development was another world and way beyond the scope of many of the old school DOS
programmers.

Best regards,

Kari Eveli
LEXITEC Book Publishing (Finland)
lexitec@xxxxxxxx

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