Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!
cs.utexas.edu!uunet!modcomp!srp
From: s...@modcomp.UUCP (Steve Pietrowicz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: WordPerfect dumps Amiga
Keywords: WordPerfect
Message-ID: <155@modcomp.UUCP>
Date: 2 May 89 01:00:25 GMT
Lines: 103
WordPerfect has decided to stop further development work for the Amiga.
The following message was posted to CompuServe's AmigaTech Forum on Saturday
morning, and is reposted here with permission. I'm sure that's it's started
to make it's rounds on various BBS systems, but for those of you who haven't
seen it yet, here is the original posting. Since the posting, Mr. Peterson
has been answering people's questions about this on CIS. (He's on the board
of directors of WP). If you wish to send him e-mail or post a notice to him,
his ID is listed below.
If you wish to send a letter to WordPerfect, the address is:
WordPerfect Corporation
1555 N. Technology Way
Orem, UT 84057
-----------------------------
#: 45802 S3/Hot News and Rumors
29-Apr-89 00:20:43
Sb: #WPCorp Backs Off
Fm: Pete Peterson WPCorp 72067,3552
To: All
I spent some time on the phone today with an Amiga user who wanted to tell
me how upset he was to learn that we have cancelled PlanPerfect for the
Amiga and put on hold any plans for a major revision to WordPerfect. The
person was especially upset to learn that the decision was based largely on
monetary considerations.
All of this is true. This week we took five programmers from the Amiga
group and moved them to OS/2 or Unix. That left two programmerto
maintain (fix the bugs) in the current versions of WordPerfect and Library.
We will continue to sell these versions, and we will from time to time
issue minor releases to fix bugs.
For those of you who are unhappy or upset about the decision, I offer the
following explanation. I know it may not help much to understand the
reasons, but I will offer hem to you so you at least know what happened.
As has been discussed on this forum, we have a few problems in the Amiga
market. I would suggest our problems are as follows: 1--We do not show
fonts on screen; 2--We do not support any graphics on screen or in a
document; 3--Our price is too high for the market; and 4--Some people feel
our software has too many bugs. 4 is, of course, something we can do
something about (and there is an interim release coming in a couple of
weeks). 1, 2 and 3 are touvher.
We don't have an easy way of getting fonts and graphics on screen. 5.0 for
the PC handles fonts and graphics well, but not on screen. We probably
won't have a WYSIWYG DOS version that can be ported for another year, and a
port of a DOS version would take 18 months after that.
The Amiga programmers had been planning on porting the next Mac version,
but the big problem with using the Mac code (which is 68000 assembly) is
that we rely completely on the Macintosh facilities for printing. That
means the Amiga group would have to write all the printing code themselves,
in addition to the code translation. Such a product could not be ready
until mid-1990 at the earliest--and probably longer. We thought of using
our printing code from the C (Unix) version, but the codes is just too big
to be used effectively on the Amiga.
The third alternative is to write a word processor rom scratch. Such a
project would take 6 n 7 programmers about 18 months (an optimistic
guess).
So whatever we do, we arrive very late to the market--probably the end of
1990 at the earliest. And once we arrive, we probably have to enter with a
price closer to $195. At that price (distributor price of $80-$100) given
the salaries we pay our programmers and the support we offer, we don't feel
we can make money.
Most of our Amiga programmers are very discouraged with the decision. They
love the machine and they like working together. They have worked hard
without much commercial success. But Bruce, Alan and I (the Board of
Directors) cannot fund the new products without some hope that the products
will be successful. Given the timing, the price point, and the costs of
development, it just doesn't make sense.
We had hoped the German market would generate enough money to pay for the
projects, but unfortunately we are not selling in Germany. While sales of
the Amiga are strong, mostof the sales are for 500s, and we don't run well
at all on the 500.
We're sorry. We kno a lot of ustomers will be unhappy with these
decisions. We entered the market because a few of our programmers loved
the machine. It was a decision of the heart, not:he head. We tried to
pull back last summer when our WordPerfect sales fell off badly, but the
programmers pleaded for more time. We reconsidered the decision in
January, and again (with our hearts) decided to give it a little more time.
Since then sales have fallen off even more, and now we don't see any way to
justify the new products.
WordPerfect is a great word processor and the Amiga is a great machine.
Our 4.1, 4.2 or 5.0 versions, however, are not the right versions for the
Amiga. We need 6.0, and 6.0 isn't ready yet. Once it's ready, we may
change our decision, but in the meantime, we can make better use of the
programmers on other machines. Pete
--------------END OF MESSAGE-------------------
Steve Pietrowicz
uucp: ...!uunet!modcomp!srp
CIS: 73047,2313
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!killer!elg
From: e...@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Eric Green)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: WordPerfect dumps Amiga
Message-ID: <7987@killer.Dallas.TX.US>
Date: 3 May 89 02:35:47 GMT
References: <155@modcomp.UUCP>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 44
in article <1...@modcomp.UUCP>, s...@modcomp.UUCP (Steve Pietrowicz) says:
[lots of apologetic text from Wordperfect person, forwarded from Compuserve]
[ and then, just for a sampler:]
> WordPerfect is a great word processor and the Amiga is a great machine.
> Our 4.1, 4.2 or 5.0 versions, however, are not the right versions for the
> Amiga. We need 6.0, and 6.0 isn't ready yet. Once it's ready, we may
> change our decision, but in the meantime, we can make better use of the
> programmers on other machines. Pete
>
> --------------END OF MESSAGE-------------------
Would-be customer support people, take note: the above forwarded
message is one of the best pieces of technical writing that I've seen
in a long time. Maybe we should forward his name to Telenet, for them
to hire him as PC Pursuit public relations (typical PC Pursuit
manager's posting: "If you post <certain information about PC
Pursuit>, we'll kick you off. If you post <competitor's phone #>,
we'll delete it and kick you off"). Instead, potential PR people, note
the careful reasoned and apologetic tone, calculated to gain sympathy.
Technical writers, note how well the final paragraph summarizes the
entire message. Everybody, note the final sentence, calculated to cast
a ray of hope on the whole situation.
All in all, that message was the work of a true artist. My hat is off
to the person who wrote it. This is meant most sincerely, in no way
satirically.
In the meantime, the only other large word processor is Excellence!,
which is so mind-bogglingly slow that I'd have to be doped up on
Qualudes to use it. So the question is, "What now?" Note how many
people he said would be required to write Wordperfect 6.0 from
scratch... do you see any Amiga software companies with the resources
to put that many people onto a project? DO you see ANY software
company daring to trod where WordPerfect feared to go?
Sounds like it's about time for me to buy TeX, eh?
--
| // Eric Lee Green P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509 |
| // ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg (318)989-9849 |
| // Join the Church of HAL, in worship of all computers with |
|\X/ three-character names (e.g. IBM and DEC). White lab coats optional. |
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!rutgers!
apple!oliveb!amiga!cbmvax!daveh
From: da...@cbmvax.UUCP (Dave Haynie)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: WordPerfect dumps Amiga
Message-ID: <6751@cbmvax.UUCP>
Date: 3 May 89 17:31:21 GMT
References: <7987@killer.Dallas.TX.US>
Organization: Commodore Technology, West Chester, PA
Lines: 55
in article <7...@killer.Dallas.TX.US>, e...@killer.Dallas.TX.US (Eric Green) says:
> DO you see ANY software company daring to trod where WordPerfect feared to
> go?
I'm not sure just where WordPerfect did go. Certainly when it came out for the
Amiga, about the only other games in town were Scribble 1.0, TextCraft, and
possibly ProWrite 1.0. WordPerfect did really well, even though the program
wasn't much better than the PC version. Of course, the PC version did very
well, I've heard 40%-60% of the PC market or some outrageous figure, so I
understand why WordPerfect arrived as it did. I have it myself. And it can,
given enough effort on the part of the user, do most anything a mid-level
wordprocessor might be expected to do. But most of those things are very tuff
to get working. I myself spent the better part of a day, once, trying to get
the footnotes on a document to come out properly in a slightly smaller font on
a HP laserjet. No dice. No WYSIWYG. But for awhile, they were the ONLY
acceptible alternative, since they could do pretty much what I wanted.
Nowaday there are alternatives, and many of them fit better in the Amiga
environment. Sure, graphic wordprocessors like Excellence and ProWrite 2.0
are somewhat slow, but WordPerfect was no speed demon itself. Both of
these graphic wordprocessors now know how to use the printer's own font,
ala WordPerfect, if that's what you want. And as of 1.3, if you instead want
bitmapped fonts, the printer drivers work acceptably now with that, and give
you integrated graphics as well. There are several new wordprocessors in the
same vein I haven't played with yet, and if you go to Europe, you'll find
about 5 you haven't likely seen yet in the German market. Also, all the
top DTP packages nowadays have build-in wordprocessors.
> Sounds like it's about time for me to buy TeX, eh?
That may be the exact thing to do. I personally don't see that much room in
the Amiga market for something like WordPerfect. I can find wordprocessors
that are easier to use and true WYSIWYG, or go to Tek for a real document
formatting language. The stuff I struggled to get WordPerfect to do I did
10 years ago in Scribe (another formatting language) without a hitch. I could
do much of that in any real WYSIWYG wordprocessor for the Amiga. Don't take
this as a blasting of WordPerfect; it's probably the best of that breed of
wordprocessor, it's got an excellent manual, and it's backed by a good
company.
The Tek system for the Amiga is probably the best Tek for any machine, and you
can do absolutely anything with it. It's designed for dealing with very large
documents. It's not DTP, but it'll let you format equations and tables much
easier than any DTP or wordprocessor I've ever come across. We'll probably be
getting some in here real soon now.
> | // Eric Lee Green P.O. Box 92191, Lafayette, LA 70509 |
> | // ..!{ames,decwrl,mit-eddie,osu-cis}!killer!elg (318)989-9849 |
> | // Join the Church of HAL, in worship of all computers with |
> |\X/ three-character names (e.g. IBM and DEC). White lab coats optional. |
--
Dave Haynie "The 32 Bit Guy" Commodore-Amiga "The Crew That Never Rests"
{uunet|pyramid|rutgers}!cbmvax!daveh PLINK: D-DAVE H BIX: hazy
Amiga -- It's not just a job, it's an obsession
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!uxc!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!
ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!jacobson
From: jacob...@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: More on WordPerfects Reasons
Message-ID: <45600063@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 4 May 89 03:36:00 GMT
Lines: 92
Nf-ID: #N:uxe.cso.uiuc.edu:45600063:000:5770
Nf-From: uxe.cso.uiuc.edu!jacobson May 3 22:36:00 1989
Here is some interesting further info from Wordperfect on what happened from
their view.
Captured from another net:
Sb: #WPCorp & Amiga products Fm: Amiga WordPerfect 72447,3427 To: ALL
Just to make sure that everyone understands...WordPerfect Corporation is
currently doing no NEW development for the Amiga. There are two programmers
assigned to continue with maintenance. This means that the promised 4.1
maintenance update WILL be done (although it might take longer). All shipping
products will be supported and updated as necessary for maintenance. I will
also, from time to time, drop in and answer questions (as my new position
permits).
The reasons for this decision are several, below I will give a general
description of some of the more important ones:
- Small market: CBM has made a lot of noise about it's reaching the 1M mark in
machines sold, but our realistic market is MUCH smaller. We estimate that
there are roughly 300,000 machines in the U.S. We have sold approximately
26,000 units in the US. This gives a market share of approximately 9%. We
estimate that this figure is approaching the saturation of our potential
market. We feel that although there are lots of Amigas out there, there are
is only a small segment of those that want/require the functionality of
WordPerfect. To help bolster those dismal number, we turned to the rest of
the world (Germany initially) CBM claims that Germany is a bigger market than
the US. We have sold roughly 2,500 copies of WP in Germany (not even enough
to cover the translation costs. We have also talked with several other
software developers, all of them indicating that they've had a dismal
experience outside the US. All told, we've sold slightly more than 30,000
units world-wide (a large amount of them at dramatically discounted prices
(the 500 bundle, etc.). Since our products are targeted heavily to the
business market, we do not think that our market share can dramically increase
until the Amiga has a much stronger hold in the business world. The market the
CBM claims may be there, but unless you're writing games, you're not going to
even come close to getting much of it. While it is true that there are only
2-2.5 million MACs in the world, there is a HUGE difference in their market,
in that there is a large share of them in the market that WordPerfect targets
its products.
- Insufficient sales: Many people would be very happy with sales of 30K units.
WordPerfect Corporation cannot be. There are huge costs in products such as
WordPerfect. Just to get it out the door cost nearly $750,000. Costs of the
manual, maintenance, toll-free support, and product enhancement have tallied
up to the point where monthly product sales cannot cover monthly costs. Our
costs were roughly $70-90K/month. During the past year we've only had two
months where sales were able to cover the costs.
- Time: Around this time last year, the Amiga WP development team was cut to
two people (for the same reasons as this time), CBM was made aware of this.
From that time the group slowly grew as we tried to broaden our product line
(to make up for the insufficient WP sales). Library was attempt at this. We
had lots of positive reaction to Library when we showed it, but in the end, it
just didn't sale. In the end it lost nearly $350,000.
- 5.0/6.0 cost prohibitive: In order to satisfy our users wants/needs (and
increase our market share to a break even level) we feel it important to have
graphics capabilities and high quality printing (a la 5.0). We've done some
work in that direction and done a lot of evaluating. We estimate that the
project would require 8-10 man years. So, with 5 programmers (which we didn't
have) we could have done it in 2 years. With the current market, or even an
optimistic view of the market in 2 years we do not feel that the investment
will ever be recouperated.
- Experiment: When WPCorp started working on the Amiga we didn't know what was
going to happen. We felt that there was a chance (since the Amiga is still,
IMHO, the best micro-computer on the market for the $) that things would go
well. Things didn't go as we had hoped. It's sad. I'd rather be working on it
right now. We're not necessarily pointing fingers, but we do feel frustrated
and the comments of Stan Kalisher (Impulse) in AmigaArts/WP/DP Publishing
#15941 do reflect some of those frustrations rather well.
- Money: OK, call us greedy, call us what you want. But, frankly, over the
existence of the Amiga group we've lost nearly $800,000. No one can justify
such an existence. We kept (being loyal Amiga programmers) the axe away as
long as we could. We were optimistic for as long as we could. But when
you're losing that much money you just can't go on forever. A company that
goes on ignoring a wound like that will eventually loose all it's blood and
die. None of us programming on the Amiga liked it, but we felt it a necessary
step.
We can look at this as the best alternative under the circumstances. Since
WPCorp is doing the things it needs to in order to keep alive, it will still
be around when the Amiga finally takes it's place in the business community
(assuming CBM gets it's act together). We'll be able to re-enter the Amiga
market with all the technology we're developing on other graphics oriented
machines.
// Lynn LeBaron
\X/ Manager, Amiga Development
WordPerfect Corporation
End of Msg 64
Enter Msg to Read (1 - 68)
>
Command >
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!modcomp!srp
From: s...@modcomp.UUCP (Steve Pietrowicz)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: WordPerfect comes back
Keywords: WordPerfect
Message-ID: <158@modcomp.UUCP>
Date: 9 May 89 02:54:43 GMT
Lines: 45
After posting their announcement about dropping future Amiga development, Pete
Peterson and Lynn LeBaron of WP stayed on CompuServe and listened to user
comments. And, believe it or not, it must have made a difference! The
following notice was posted to CompuServe today.
--------------------------------------
#: 47430 S3/Hot News and Rumors
08-May-89 15:42:17
Sb: #WPCorp & Amiga
Fm: Amiga WordPerfect 72447,3427
To: ALL
OK, things are looking up, the decision has been made.
As of today (8 May 1989) WordPerfect Corporation will continue to do new
development on WordPerfect for the Amiga. Three programmers will be
working on both maintaining version 4.1 and Library, and additionally they
will be working on a future version of WordPerfect.
Due to these limited resources, development will procede at a slower pace.
No attempt will be made to do a 6.0 product for the time being. However,
features will be added to the current product to move it in that direction.
Currently, the first priority is to complete the maintanence update of
4.1. This should take less than a month.
Next, development will be done on the new version. The current plans are
not complete, but here are some of the ideas:
- 4.2 file format
- Print preview
- Sort
- Document comments
- ARexx support
- Non-interactive spell checking
- Better scroll bar support
- Other 4.2 & 5.0 enhancements (dependant on demand & time)
We can now move forward and get back to doing some real work on the Amiga.
Please let me know of any opinions you have on the next version of
WordPerfect.
We have not totally ruled out graphics support, it is something we are
considering, but with the limited resources it is hard to justify. We
will, of course be looking at fixing the anomalies of 4.1 (scroll bars)
along with adding the new features.
//
\X/ Lynn
--------------------------------------
--
Stephen R. Pietrowicz UUCP: ...!uunet!modcomp!srp CIS: 73047,2313