Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Whoa.
I'm not profiling anybody and certainly not anybody *today*.
I'm reporting well-documented facts from the early 80's when corporate IT was wrestling with issues of training, file conversions,printer drivers, and what not.
It was all over INFOWORLD, COMPUTERWORLD, PC WEEK etc.
Getting regular users up to speed was a big issue, which is where the training industry sprung from, and then getting them to switch was a bigger one as the crown of "category king" switched from one product to another. Line managers and IT had big fights over it: one side fretted over wasted time and effort retraining and the other over the costs and issues arising from supporting pockets of oddball and "deprecated" products.
That stuff *happened*.
I saw it happen and I saw it dealt with.
And the way it was dealt with was "everybody" settling on MS Office as the standard--whichover Word Oerfect, over DEC, over IBM, over Wang--which is why Office today has so much sticking power even in the face of free. We hear all sorts of anecdotes of this place or that switching to google or Open Office or what not. And it happens. But what happens most often is that IT departments stick with Office and as their companies grow, so does Office use. IT departments are absurdly conservative because they remember what things were like when they weren't.
Corporate cultures have looonggg memories.
(And apparently so does GRRM.)  |
None of which has
anything to do with the fact that -- at one time -- WordStar was corporate America's most popular word processor. That there was a lot of support for it. Or that there were college classes that taught WordStar. Or that there were online BBS and commercial forums (CompuServe was the big one) -- early on -- that supported WordStar. You need to realize that WordStar existed between the late 70s through the mid 90s -- a whole lot changed in that time period in PCs. What you're talking about mostly happened in the very early days of CP/M -- but standardization and big leaps in design and computer speed followed quickly after IBM introduced the PC in 1981. At that point classes for Lotus 1-2-3, WordStar and dBASE become more and more common. Just as now, Microsoft Office classes are common.