Almost Perfect WE Pete Peterson eBook
Download As PDF : Almost Perfect WE Pete Peterson eBook 
The fascinating inside story of WordPerfect Corporation's rise from rags to riches, straight from the man who ran the company.
In 1980 Pete Peterson was hired as the $5-an-hour part-time office manager by a fledgling software company. That company became WordPerfect Corporation, and Peterson quickly became Executive Vice President. "Almost Perfect" is Peterson's first-person account of how a group of business neophytes built a half-billion-dollar software company from the ground up.
Almost Perfect WE Pete Peterson eBook
At one time, WordPerfect dominated the world of word processing apps, and Microsoft was considered to be a pesky upstart with their Windows operating environment, which was then a graphical shell for MS-DOS. But history and management techniques can have interesting effects over time.Author W.E. Pete Peterson's Almost Perfect is a first-person account of life at WordPerfect, from the time in the 1970s when word processing was still fairly new. It describes his rise from a $5 per hour part-time job to traveling sales manager and eventually to WordPerfect's executive vice president, from the times when the company had a handful of employees, to when it grew to command more than 50 percent of the global word processing software market, and that was on multiple computer platforms.
But mistakes were made, many of them, and the biggest of those was in not recognizing the rapid growth of the emerging Microsoft Windows operating environment. WordPerfect was in the enviable position to become the world's word processing standard, and was available on almost every hardware platform. Microsoft Word was only on two of the then-lesser ones, and mighty IBM's DisplayWrite was only available on IBM machines. Regarding the upgrade release of his company's flagship program, author Peterson wrote: "If we could get 5.0 right, we had the potential to stay on top for many years to come."
The author spent twelve years with WordPerfect before he was let go in 1992, seemingly the first victim of the company's tough battle to fend off the increasingly popular Microsoft Word. Some of this first-person narrative has a slight ring of sour grapes from a man who had a somewhat abrasive management style, but it's a fast and interesting read. There are other books on this tumultuous era of software growth, notably Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes, and Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace. Both of these are not only interesting for fans of computer and software history, but are written better.
Almost Perfect is an absorbing story of a company that that is no more, as told by an insider. Their attempts to go public failed, and the owners sold the company to software and services company Novell. But WordPerfect sales kept declining, and Novell sold off most of the WordPerfect products for a bargain price to Canadian software and programming company Corel Corporation in 1996. WordPerfect is still used by millions, but whether Corel is really making money with the product remains to be seen, as Microsoft is a very tough competitor.
4/29/2013
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Almost Perfect WE Pete Peterson eBook Reviews
A quick read and a cool look back to software in the 80's.
I don't remember now how I came across this book, but I bought it a few months ago and only got around to reading it over the past week. I admit that I was attracted to the book out of sheer nostalgia. I was one of millions of computer users whose first -significant- experience with a personal computer came through using WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS.
The book is written by a WordPerfect insider from the early days W. E. "Pete" Peterson, who went from office manager in 1980 to executive vice president before he was essentially fired in 1992. From his own descriptions, Peterson sounds like the kind of boss that no one wants to work for. He comes across as a killjoy who is not interested in the individuality of the employee, but rather seems to desire a team of robots who will come to work, do what they're told and be loyal to the company. Of course, any boss can be a jerk. There are the Steve Jobs, who are obvious jerks, but have such vision and charisma that people wanted to work for them anyway. Peterson is not that kind of boss.
Peterson throws out sayings like "While it would have been easier to always give the customers what they wanted, I had a hard time believing "the customer is always right." In fact, I had come to the conclusion that the person who coined the phrase had actually meant to say, "the customer always gripes..." (location 2675). So, it sounds like he had a problem with both his own employees and the company's customers. Of course, to Peterson's credit, he admits near the end of the book, "I took myself and my job too seriously" (location 2828).
The book, while interesting in points--especially to anyone who used the software or kept up with WordPefect Corp. in its heyday--suffers from a lack of significant editing. I don't know the publishing history of the book (there is a physical edition Almost Perfect How a Bunch of Regular Guys Built Wordperfect Corporation not linked above on this page, published by Prima Publishing), but it reads like the average self-published book that demonstrates why editors really are needed, even in this age of easy publication. Not only are there the occasional typos and missing words, the book also lacks variety in sentence structure that makes for poor sentence fluency, and it is a bit tedious to read at times.
Of course, the main source of tedium in the book comes from Peterson's longwinded descriptions of his management philosophy, which even after being fired, he seems bent on defending. I can only imagine how new employees must have felt having to sit and listen to hour after hour of this stuff during the early induction phase of their jobs (which Peterson made a point to administer himself). A good editor would have surely condensed some of this content, which gets repetitive at times. I tended to simply skim through it.
Written in 1994, only two years after he left the company, Peterson still has a bit of sour grapes for the way things turned out. There's an addendum to the book, written in 1998 after WordPerfect had been sold to Novell and then Corel, and Peterson seems slightly more subdued by that point; but there is still a seemingly implied message that if only they'd kept him on board, things might have turned out differently.
Again, there are some interesting parts of the book. And it's interesting that WordPerfect Corp. tried to put its word processor on every single platform back in the uncertain days of which operating system would come out on top. The company tried to be THE ubiquitous word processor, but in doing so stretched their resources thin and often failed to have the vision to know where they really needed to focus.
We all know that Microsoft Word for Windows trumped Wordperfect because the Utah-based company came very late to the game in introducing a Windows version. And when they finally did, it really stunk. I should know because I bought it with great anticipation of moving from WordPerfect for DOS to WordPerfect for Windows, only to be extremely disappointed in the actual final product. I remember calling WordPerfect's amazingly free toll free tech support only to find out that I had discovered bugs in the program that they knew nothing about, AND I knew more about Windows than the tech support people I was talking to. After a couple of weeks of frustration, I packed the program up, sent it back for a refund and spent the money on Microsoft Word for Windows--which evidently most other people did, too.
What I didn't know about the Windows debacle until I read the book was that part of the reason WP was so late with a Windows version of their software came from the sheer hatred Peterson and other WP leadership had for Microsoft. They clearly didn't want Windows to win and spent a number of years focusing more efforts on an OS/2 version that ended up being released even later than the Windows version. I understand the frustration of not wanting Windows to win the platform war, but in this case, it was an instance of personal feelings getting in the way of good business decisions.
Today, the only other platform from that time besides Windows that is around is the Macintosh. And yet, in a sense, a similar mistake was made with the Mac. When the Mac was being introduced, WP Corp. made the decision to create a version of their software for the Apple II -before- working on a version for the Mac. Perhaps if OS/2 and the Apple II had prevailed, WordPerfect would be king today, but on both Windows and the Mac, they left the door wide open to Microsoft to claim victory.
I would have been interested to know some of the inside story of the situation surrounding the fall of WordPerfect and its subsequent sale to other hands, but this era of the company's history is only briefly touched upon in the 1998 addendum to the book. I would be interested to know where Peterson is today. There are wikipedia entries on the cofounders of the company, but unfortunately, not on the company's once #3 executive.
At one time, WordPerfect dominated the world of word processing apps, and Microsoft was considered to be a pesky upstart with their Windows operating environment, which was then a graphical shell for MS-DOS. But history and management techniques can have interesting effects over time.
Author W.E. Pete Peterson's Almost Perfect is a first-person account of life at WordPerfect, from the time in the 1970s when word processing was still fairly new. It describes his rise from a $5 per hour part-time job to traveling sales manager and eventually to WordPerfect's executive vice president, from the times when the company had a handful of employees, to when it grew to command more than 50 percent of the global word processing software market, and that was on multiple computer platforms.
But mistakes were made, many of them, and the biggest of those was in not recognizing the rapid growth of the emerging Microsoft Windows operating environment. WordPerfect was in the enviable position to become the world's word processing standard, and was available on almost every hardware platform. Microsoft Word was only on two of the then-lesser ones, and mighty IBM's DisplayWrite was only available on IBM machines. Regarding the upgrade release of his company's flagship program, author Peterson wrote "If we could get 5.0 right, we had the potential to stay on top for many years to come."
The author spent twelve years with WordPerfect before he was let go in 1992, seemingly the first victim of the company's tough battle to fend off the increasingly popular Microsoft Word. Some of this first-person narrative has a slight ring of sour grapes from a man who had a somewhat abrasive management style, but it's a fast and interesting read. There are other books on this tumultuous era of software growth, notably Gates How Microsoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry and Made Himself the Richest Man in America by Stephen Manes, and Hard Drive Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace. Both of these are not only interesting for fans of computer and software history, but are written better.
Almost Perfect is an absorbing story of a company that that is no more, as told by an insider. Their attempts to go public failed, and the owners sold the company to software and services company Novell. But WordPerfect sales kept declining, and Novell sold off most of the WordPerfect products for a bargain price to Canadian software and programming company Corel Corporation in 1996. WordPerfect is still used by millions, but whether Corel is really making money with the product remains to be seen, as Microsoft is a very tough competitor.
4/29/2013
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