Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sytelus | Hacker News Reader

This is quite a treasure trove of data for Word 1.0:

- 55 man years

- 38 man years by full time employees (FTEs)

- 7000 LOC/yr code written per FTE

- product + tools = 347 KLOC

- 12,511 bugs, 9377 deemed fixable

- 1197 bugs postponed (13% of that were fixable)

- 247 bugs/yr fixed per FTE

- 38 bugs/KLOC

- Total 5 yrs (1st yr just 1 person, last yr had 13 max, other yrs had 10 avg)

It is quite amazing that a young company allowed such a long running project and kept at it despite of many schedule misses for 5 years. This is now almost never observed even in resource rich mega corps.

Also it seems developer productivity and bug count per KLOC has more or less remained same all these years. I haven't spent much time on researching this but if its true then I wonder what we gained out of improvements in languages and other development infrastructure? May be perhaps ability to scale to teams of 100s of developers per project totalling million KLOC? Interestingly World 1.0 team never went above 13 people despite of so many delays - may be because it was hard to scale using infrastructure available at the time (for example, no OOP)? Regardless the fact that average developer productivity in terms of KLOC and bugs/KLOC has remained fairly constant is very interesting.

I think the knew it had to be built. If Windows lacked a word processor it would be fundamentally uncompetitive against Mac.

(I hadn't realised that the program started out in Xenix, Mac and DOS before eventually arriving at Windows!)

I know I'm showing the grey in my beard to say this, but I LOVED Word for DOS. It was fast and incredibly capable, and IIRC it was the only word processor available at the time (late 80s) that had a solid & usable stylesheet implementation.

The thing is, though, most people didn't use it. Then as now, people just manually formatted titles and whatnot, without ever realizing that they could define "Header 1" to be whatever they wanted and using it throughout, etc.

The folks who loved it, though, were people working in larger documents. At the time, I had a student job at my university, and more than once I helped grad students with dissertations and theses manage their stylesheets, and to watch the light bulb come on was pretty neat.

word 5 for DOS was so solid that I used it as my primary word processor for YEARS after it was technically out of date. WFW was a DOG initially -- incredibly slow, ridiculously unstable, etc. Even the final DOS version (5.5) was weak; they reskinned it to use a text-mode implementation of the CUA-style menu structure, replacing the idiosyncratic menus of the original DOS version and thereby destroying its speed.

(Kids: Back in the day, every program had its own menus and commands; there was no real uniformity of interface at all. It kinda sucked, but in this case it was a real strength of the product.)

You can try Word 5 emulated in your browser: https://archive.org/details/msdos_microsoft_word5

(you can also download directly a floppy image: https://winworldpc.com/product/microsoft-word/5x-dos )

The manual (for version 1): http://toastytech.com/manuals/MS%20Word%201.00%20for%20DOS%2...

Microsoft offers version 5.5 for download here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/word97win/Wd55_be/97/...

Microsoft beat WordPerfect in the transition to Windows.

This was the product that eventually killed WordPerfect and gave them a decades long monopoly in word processing that still exists.

Lotus 123 suffered a similar fate against Excel.

WordPerfect had stagnated and lacked features. That’s why it died.

No, that’s not accurate.

They took too long to get to Windows. Then Microsoft created the Office bundle and never looked back.

To some degree WordPerfect also failed due to a classic "Innovator's Dilemma" situation. They had a huge customer base of MS-DOS users and tried to keep them happy by maintaining a similar user experience in the Windows edition. And they were fairly successful it that goal, but the product ended up looking weird and counter intuitive to new users who were familiar with the standard Windows look and feel.

The lesson is that sometimes you need to have the courage to disregard what existing customers want.

> The lesson is that sometimes you need to have the courage to disregard what existing customers want.

The problem is that this can kill you, too. If you abandon your current customers, chances are that they’ll choose a new solution because you’ve taken away their “easy path” upgrade and also pissed them off. You also send a message to your potential new customers that you won’t care about them if it becomes inconvenient.

This is the real innovators dilemma: there is no path to guaranteed (or even likely) victory. You can take a chance on the future but it is likely to kill you faster than clinging to the past.

Sure there are no guarantees. Even leaders who understand the innovator's dilemma eventually miss a disruptive shift in the market and lose their dominant position. That's why I'm not too concerned about the current dominance of large tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook. In 50 years MBA students will probably be reading case studies about how they screwed up and were acquired for pennies on the dollar by competitors who don't even exist today.

I loved the WordPerfect "RevealCodes" mode - made style management really easy.

Word hid everything in paragraph markers (or section markers). Suddenly things become opaque and you get in to the mode of "create a new doc and copy and paste everything into it except for the final paragraph marker" - this is the equivalent of Ctrl+Alt+Del for a Word doc, and I use it to this day... Sigh...

Consider windows 3.0 was released on 1989 and according to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0

Windows 3.0 HW requirements was 8088 with 386K-2MB of memory.

The word 1.0 can be run on that OS with such limited resource, that was a very impressive achievements. I assume non-trivial amount of time was probably involve on design/debugging all the GUI features around such limit amount of memory.

Today's it would be very hard to find anything non-trivial that can be run with 2MB of memory - not to mention working word processor with OS/GUI.

Imagine correcting bugs without internet updates

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