In the turn-about-is-fair-play department, Microsoft may have better productivity products than Google, but it may not really matter. The story is not unlike what happened to Lotus and WordPerfect more than a decade ago.
Datamation has a new take on Google’s unfolding rivalry with Microsoft.
In the early 1990s, WordPerfect dominated the word processor scene, and Microsoft Word was a scrappy underdog. It’s hard to believe now, but it’s true.
As Word rose in popularity, many WordPerfect users resisted. They had spent so much time learning the WordPerfect-specific keystrokes, called function keys. So what did Microsoft do? They enabled a mode whereby WordPerfect keystrokes would execute the same commands in Word that they did in WordPerfect.
In addition, Microsoft gave discounts on Windows to OEMs who included Word on new PCs. The result was (and maybe still is) that most new PCs came with Word pre-installed, and the additional cost was pretty low.
Besides, WordPerfect was really just a relic of the DOS era, and Word was a creature of the new world of graphical computing. And the rest, including WordPerfect as a dominant application, is history.
