I'm old enough to actually have been a user of both WordPerfect and Word in the early days, so I saw the rise and fall of WordPerfect, along with the rise of Word and MS Office, through the eyes of a user.
Basically, Wordperfect was the best word processor out there during the late 80s to early 90s. Keep in mind that at the time, most people did not do their own word processing.
WordPerfect 5.2 I remember as being the very best word processor out there. However, Microsoft came out with MS Word for DOS, and I remember distinctly using Word 2.0. At the time, there were a lot of issues where sometimes when you typed on Word, you would get snow on the screen, but it was pretty fast compared to WordPerfect. The rumor was that Microsoft was using special APIs that WordPerfect (and any of their other competitors) didn't have access to that allowed them to have faster performance and smaller latency when dealing with larger documents, etc. But WordPerfect was clearly the superior program.
The key was that WordPerfect didn't adapt well to Windows. When Windows 3.1 came out the version of Word for Windows was excellent, vs the version of WordPerfect. WordPerfect was really clunky from what I remember, and as Windows took off, they never really got any traction and as more version of Windows and Word came around, the difference between Word and WordPerfect grew cavernous. By 1995, if I remember, no one even considered WordPerfect as viable compared to Word.
Then the whole Corel/WP debacle occurred which cemented the death of both of those companies.
Basically, Wordperfect was the best word processor out there during the late 80s to early 90s. Keep in mind that at the time, most people did not do their own word processing.
WordPerfect 5.2 I remember as being the very best word processor out there. However, Microsoft came out with MS Word for DOS, and I remember distinctly using Word 2.0. At the time, there were a lot of issues where sometimes when you typed on Word, you would get snow on the screen, but it was pretty fast compared to WordPerfect. The rumor was that Microsoft was using special APIs that WordPerfect (and any of their other competitors) didn't have access to that allowed them to have faster performance and smaller latency when dealing with larger documents, etc. But WordPerfect was clearly the superior program.
The key was that WordPerfect didn't adapt well to Windows. When Windows 3.1 came out the version of Word for Windows was excellent, vs the version of WordPerfect. WordPerfect was really clunky from what I remember, and as Windows took off, they never really got any traction and as more version of Windows and Word came around, the difference between Word and WordPerfect grew cavernous. By 1995, if I remember, no one even considered WordPerfect as viable compared to Word.
Then the whole Corel/WP debacle occurred which cemented the death of both of those companies.