Reply to post: Re: "Wordperfect was crap compared to MS Word" etc etc.

Re: "Wordperfect was crap compared to MS Word" etc etc.

Microsoft had working OLE and was highly and rightly praised for it. None of their rivals included it for years after it became available and when they did, their implementation was years behind MS Office.

For whatever it's worth, Microsoft had a superior office suite that worked fine, particularly if your language wasn't English. For some reason, everyone just ignored language localization and then they tried to cry wolf that Microsoft had a monopoly and demanded local regulators to do something about it.

FYI, when I was younger, I was campaigning against Microsoft on behalf of these companies here in Poland. I didn't look into the details and took their claims for granted (hey, it was Micro$oft, so it was trendy to hate it). Years later, out of curiosity, I tried late-90s versions of Wordperfect, Lotus and other office software of which I can't remember the name, and I realized I was had. They were utter crap. Oh, sure, some of the things were nicer, better done, performance was better, but all of that was quite meaningless if you ran into issues trying to write in native Polish. I can't remember which program had it, but its keyboard shortcuts were hardwired and you couldn't change or even disable them. One such shortcut was Ctrl+z which was undo. But AltGr+z is ż, which is a fairly common letter in Polish. AltGr registers as Alt+Ctrl, and trying to type ż resulted in undoing your previous action. AltGr+o is ó, another common letter, but it also brought up the open file dialog and you never knew if it would put ó in the document or as the first letter of the filename in the dialog popup.

That made it completely unusable. There were many different gotchas in everything except MS Office. I don't know and I don't care if they used undocumented system calls, I don't care if they optimized their OS to better serve their own software. In the end, Microsoft's software worked and their competition's didn't. Microsoft spent time and effort on making that software as opposed to others who didn't want to, but gladly campaigned to essentially force Microsoft to pay them money.