Customer Reviews

Almost Perfect: How a Bunch of Regular Guys Built Wordperfect Corporation

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W. E. Peterson joined Word Perfect in 1980 as a part-time office manager, and left as Executive VP of Sales in 1992. He says their success was based partly on luck: the right circumstances at the right time. [Luck favors the well prepared.] They depended on their own efforts and finances, not on burning up borrowed money. [Did this concentrate their efforts on success?] This book has his views on what was the most successful software company of the 1980s.

He explains why "reliability was more important than price" (p.41). A word processor is a means to an end, not an end in itself. A $1500 product can be less costly than a $500 product that breaks down, once you include the effect of lost production and schedules. He says the demise of word processing departments in the mid 1980s was unexpected (p.60). Yet this happened to key-punch departments a decade earlier when on-line terminals were adopted. [Will Internet E-mail reduce the market for word processors in turn?] The problem of printer support in WP was solved by the use of tables; but this resulted in slower printing. [Are separate executable modules more efficient?] One very important item of their success was their evaluation of their product by consulting with the secretaries who used it. This is much better than an ad-hoc committee of non-users. His evaluation of other companies (p.100) is interesting. Using a "lines of code" rule alone may result in bloated and redundant code, which can lead to higher maintenance, overhead, and support costs. The story of the "free Hawaii trip" (pp.131-2) illustrates the difference between "goals" and "objectives". A fixed cash bonus is a goal, a Hawaii trip an objective.

In July 1991 Pete was informed that he was too hard on people and too many people were afraid of him. [He seems to have ignored this warning.] The stress of the delayed release may have been affecting a lot of people. If the VP of Development was giving lectures from a book, could this be a sign of a problem? Was there a problem from a "flat management" philosophy? Is it correct for any large company? Was there anything that would safeguard a company from Microsoft? Note that this clash of personalities did not occur when WP was profitable. "Victory has a thousand fathers", falling profits has a thousand finger pointers. When a small company has to redesign and redevelop its products this is a critical time. Many companies did not survive the new world of graphic interfaced personal computers. Could the Operating System be fixed to create problems for a competitor?