Understanding WordPerfect

Date: 1988

Snippet
To: Apps Staff Retreat Attendees From: Jeff Raiks Date: 3/10/88 RE: Summary and action items from the Apps Staff Retreat Cc: Russ Werner; Pam Edstrom; Valerie Houtchens

[...]

Action: ChasSt should follow up with CharlesS and others to nail down our understanding of why WordPerfect is viewed as more usable then PC Word. Perhaps the followup is a discussed meeting; if so I'd like to attend.

Our competitors are doing a lot of products; some are buying products.

All key competitive ISVs have a Mac strategy.

Tandy with Deskmate, Symantec on the Mac, and Cricket in presentations were noted as potential serious competitors.

Other competitors discussed included: Aldus, Venture Publisher, Informix/Innovative, Oracle, DEC, HP, indigenous international competitors, Open Access in Europe, Computer Associates, Enable in the Gov't market, IBM DisplayWrite as the key international competitor, MicroPro ..

Relative to competitive PM releases, BillG said we would be out first in word processing, tied (with Lotus) in spreadsheet, and behind (Lotus) in database. Scary ..

PC Word vs. WordPerfect. This is especially interesting because of the investment we are putting into Word War. My thoughts.
 * There was a long (and somewhat heated) discussion about our goals with

1. PC Word + Opus should beat WordPerfect: ie. our combined share is greater then their share (or their combined share when they have a PM product). I believe this view was unanimous.

2. PC Word by itself will not beat PC WordPerfect ...

Full Exhibit
http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/px00012.pdf