Word: wordperfect
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Microsoft's reach into many software markets gives it other advantages that work against a competitive market. For years, Microsoft Word had a huge advantage over had a huge advantage over WordPerfect and AmiPro: when a new version of Windows came out, Microsoft's Office suite was the first version to work perfectly with it. Somehow, Microsoft's own application developers usually got their hands on new versions of Windows before their competitors did. Go figure...
Could you get seen at University Health Services in less time than it takes to run WordPerfect...
...warmth of his mother (he doesn't actually offer me a Fresca but acquiesces when I ask), Gates has an intensity and enthusiasm that can be engaging, even charming. He takes a piece of paper and draws the matrix of strategies he faced when creating applications to compete with WordPerfect and Lotus. See what an exciting puzzle it was? His language is boyish rather than belligerent. The right stuff is "really neat" and "supercool" and "hardcore," while bad strategies are "crummy" and "really dumb" and "random...
...course, these problems are merely symptomatic of the larger problem of these technothriller novels: self-absorption on behalf of the author. We can imagine the writer, typing away at his word processor (another spur to novel-writing these days: anyone with WordPerfect and memories of comic book adventures can churn out a 400-pager in a few days and modem it away) loath to omit any bit of abstruse technological research accrued over many sleepless nights of study. Perhaps the MA's are the breaks he allows himself. Perhaps Death By Fire is another example of how movies have infiltrated...
Using a strategy Arthur calls "target, leverage, link and lock," Microsoft proceeded to convert dos users to Windows users, Windows users to Word users and so on down the product line. Microsoft's customers, of course, were free to switch to WordPerfect for Windows or Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows or any other competing products. But by the time those programs were ready, Microsoft already owned the markets. "You could argue," says Arthur, "that Microsoft is the product of clever strategy, mediocre technology and a hell of a lot of increasing returns...