Word history

Let's talk about Word is a pretty fascinating history of MS Word and, more importantly, how it beat its competition. The emerging business geek in me loves these kinds of stories:

Word 1.0/1.1/1.2 actually won some reviews against DOS WordPerfect, especially in things like ease of use and WYSIWYG editing. The Word team knew they had something, and put a laser focus on WordPerfect customers, asking them what they hated about WordPerfect, and making it a product goal for Word 2.0 and later to deliver features that made the most annoying things in WP trivial in Word.

Other moves were tactical. The Word planning team discovered that the WordPerfect sales force was going around to customers and showing Word opening a complex WordPerfect file (printer.tst) to show how bad the conversion was, and therefore how pointless it would be to try to switch to Word. So the Word team organized a special dev team that focused entirely on WordPerfect document import, "reverse-engineering" the WordPerfect file format (documentation for which was jealously guarded, as was the norm back then). Their goal was to make any WordPerfect doc open flawlessly in Word, but in particular their goal was to have no errors at all on printer.tst. Later the Word sales force used that same file when talking to customers as proof that Word 6.0 could open WordPerfect files flawlessly.

Also, I get a little thrill whenever I see the words "laser focus."