A Brief History of MS Word

Microsoft developer Chris Pratley has posted a brief history of Microsoft Word, with particular attention paid to Word’s victory over the seemingly-unassailable WordPerfect. Interesting stuff, especially Pratley’s focus on the speed with which Microsoft zoomed in on features ordinary end users found valuable (as opposed to journalists, who had an understandable - but not universally applicable - obsession with whether the word processor they were reviewing had a word count feature).

It’s a worthwhile article, and Pratley is quite right to note that the failure to make a successful transition to Windows 3 killed WordPerfect. What he doesn’t mention once in his article is the main reason WordPerfect corporation thought they could ignore Windows 3, i.e. that Microsoft and IBM were soon telling every business computer user out there that any but the lowest-end business users should be using OS/2. WordPerfect were concentrating on building a (very nice) WordPerfect for OS/2, just as Lotus were putting a lot of effort into Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2, and both companies were wrong-footed by Microsoft’s decision to shift their efforts away from OS/2 and back towards 16-bit versions of Windows.

Another factor which made a huge difference to Word’s market position but wasn’t (initially) a function of Word’s technical virtues was that Microsoft introduced the first Microsoft Office bundles back when Word for Windows 2 was the current version. Bundling three programs which cost £395 each for £595 (IIRC) did at least as much to build market share for Word (and Excel and PowerPoint) as adding features to Word 6 did.

Now I’m not saying that Microsoft were lying about the virtues of OS/2 during the initial stages of that project, or that Microsoft were somehow cheating by focusing on developing Word for 16-bit Windows systems, or that bundling applications was some sort of underhand tactic. What I am saying is that Microsoft Word’s success is a consequence of rather more than the virtuous user-centered development process which Pratley discusses. (Not that I imagine that he’d disagree with that assessment; I just wanted to point to his insider’s look at the process of beating WordPerfect whilst pointing out that there were other elements to Word’s success story.)

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]