“How does a dominant company go from master of the market to irrelevant niche player? The example generally proffered at this point is Ford and GM. At one time Ford owned the American car market yet a scant few years later Ford found themselves looking up at GM. It is an interesting an enlightening exercise but not the most relevant to the world of computers. Hence a look at other companies that were once dominant then marginalized is obviously in order,” Chris Seibold writes for Apple Matters.
“Microsoft is primarily a software company so an inspection of a once giant, now nearly failed, software company is in order. There is no better example for this case than Wordperfect. At one time Wordperfect was synonymous with word processing, they made a reasonably good product and had a great name but now your are lucky to stumble across anyone who actually remembers using the once ubiquitous program let alone find someone who still uses the now venerable application. So were did Wordperfect go wrong? The app missed the Windows boat. When Microsoft Word was on Version 2 Word Perfect was just limping over to Windows,” Seibold writes.
“Lateness was not the only problem facing Wordperfect, they also had to contend with the fact that the key combinations that worked so well in DOS didn’t work as flawlessly in Windows. As more and more people switched to Microsoft Word Wordperfect began a slow spiral to obscurity,” Seibold writes. “Expecting Microsoft to make mistakes of the same magnitude of the makers of Wordperfect is a bit of stretch. You’d have to imagine things like an incredibly late version of Windows, one that was not only late but a release that didn’t offer any real incentive to upgrade and, further, failed to deliver on many of the promised features while the competition keeps churning out ever better products…. Wait a minute… Apple might be on to something here!”
Full article here.
Related MacDailyNews articles:
Microsoft’s Windows ‘Vista’ too little, too late; could be rough times ahead for Redmond – July 28, 2005 (“If Windows has only a third of U.S. desktops 10 years from now, historians will point to 2005-2006 as the period when Microsoft fumbled the ball for good.”)