95On 08/08/2012 03:59 PM, James Knott wrote:
From using Wordperfect, Word, and others on a Mac years ago, Wordperfect was a miserable, rabid dog. Yes, MS played dirty but there was a good bit of incompetence with Wordperfect (and others) well before the Win95 era. I am talking late 80's on a Mac. Many vendors had no trouble writing good software for the Mac back then. Wordperfect was harshly criticized for their sloppy Mac port. I was a Mac user back then. If they could not implement the Mac GUI why would you expect them to implement any other GUI correctly? I did not back then. The hidden API's only made things worse and their incompetence more glaring.Jay Lozier wrote:When MS introduced Win95 they were well positioned to implement a good GUI for MSOffice, they had already do it once on the Mac.Check out Novell vs Microsoft for info on how Microsoft used hidden API on Windows to ensure their apps worked better than the competition. That case is in relation to Word Perfect, but Borland also found the same thing re hidden APIs.
I did try Wordperfect on a Mac in the late 80's because it had some features at that time no one else had available but found it almost impossible to use. My impression then was they did not try to understand how any GUI worked and did not want to understand. So the fact they failed was not a surprise to me.
I know circa 85 early versions of Word and Excel available on the Mac and worked very well. At the time MS paid attention to the Mac API's and GUI concepts. When Win95 came out MS had about 10 years of successful experience with GUI's. Personally, I think the hidden API's issue was partly true and partly an excuse for being caught unready. GUI's had been successfully commercialized by Apple and Amiga in the 80's. Those that made good software for GUI's had an advantage when Win95 came out even with MS playing dirty.
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