Business Wire - August 03, 1998 10:49
ALPINE, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 3, 1998--According to WordCruncher Internet Technologies' President M. Daniel Lunt, history is repeating itself. Mr. Lunt discussed one of his company's technological advantages over the current crop of search engines, and explained the similarities between this breakthrough and another that led to a significant shift in computer industry market leaders -- the defeat of WordStar by WordPerfect Corporation.
Mr. Lunt, who was WordPerfect Corporation's Vice President of Marketing from 1981-1993 and a member of the team that masterminded the company's growth from a $100K a year fledgling software company to a $700M industry giant, explained:
In the early 1980's, the word processing market leader was WordStar. WordStar was a "runoff system," which meant that if you wanted to see what your document looked like, you had to print it out. This is a lot like the problem today's popular Internet Search Engines have. Virtually every one of them present data or "hits" in a fairly standard form -- as a list of sites that probably or might contain relevant information. A couple of lines of text are displayed, usually from the top of a site's page or from a summary, to help the user zero in on the right site(s). But just like with WordStar long ago, if you really want to see what you've got, you must take another step.
With WordStar, that step involved actually printing out your document. With Internet search engines, you have to follow a link. Everybody knows what that's like -- go to each site, one at a time, find out if a hit is really "on target," then repeat the process. It's a time-consuming game of trial and error. The bottom line is that it takes too many steps and too much time to find what you're looking for.
When WordPerfect came out, we introduced WYSIWYG ("What You See Is What You Get") -- and showed users what their documents would look like, right on the screen. No more printing to see what it would look like! That single technological step forward saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions of hours and pages, was the death knell for WordStar, and started us on the road to making hundreds of millions of dollars in sales every year.
We're doing much the same thing with WordCruncher's WYSIWYG Search Results display. Instead of making you traverse HTML hyperlinks to see if your search results are relevant, we show the hit right there, surrounded by a paragraph (or so) of text. You can see at a glance if a hit is relevant, without having to first hyperlink to another web-site. This represents a fundamental shift in the search paradigm. Mr. Lunt concluded by stating, "This simple change will dramatically reduce the amount of time spent searching on the Internet and will enable WCTI to open markets everywhere."
WordCruncher Internet Technologies, Inc. trades on the OTC-BB under the symbol WCTI.
CONTACT: WordCruncher Technologies, Inc.
M. Daniel Lunt, 801/756-8833
or
Columbia Financial Group, Inc.
888/301-6271
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