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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: FaultLine who wrote (3121)	7/15/2001 1:42:42 AM
From: Drew Williams	Respond to of 12232

<<What other products of similar importance to Microsoft were given away for nothing? Windows? Word? Excel? Powerpoint? MS Project? Games? Why none of them of course.>> Well, not exactly none of them. Going back a few years, WordPerfect was the acknowledged King of the WordProcessors. Their DOS version was vastly superior to Microsoft's DOS version of Word and had market share to prove it. (Disclosure: I still have WordPerfect for DOS 5.1+ installed on one of my systems. I use WordPerfect 9 aka WordPerfect Office 2000 as my primary wordprocessor even though I also have Microsoft Office 2000 on my system.) Admittedly, WordPerfect was a little late to the Windows game, having gotten sidetracked by being pointed to OS2 by Microsoft and IBM. However, the real killer was when Microsoft started selling Microsoft Office for about the same price as the standalone Microsoft Word for Windows had been and WordPerfect for Windows still was. Consumers understood the Microsoft Office value equation right away and Microsoft's market share climbed dramatically to about 90%. People who really needed to buy one component got ALL the others for free! And, even if the others were not the best on the market, they were more than good enough for the occasional use most of them got. How many people actually use more than a tiny percentage of the features of any of these products? WordPerfect, not having a viable spreadsheet, database, or presentation software of their own, attempted to put together a "Best of Breed" WordPerfect Office by combining products from a number of different software publishers, including Borland's excellent Quattro Pro, in the same boat. This did not work very well, mainly because the various components, having been written as stand-alone applications, did not always play well together. And now you know why WordPerfect is now part of Corel instead of an independent company even though as a standalone product, WordPerfect is still superior to Microsoft Word.