WP bye-bye?
I was recently speaking with a highly placed CBM official getting
background (non-attributable) information and he told me a very interesting
story about why Word Perfect decided to drop future enhancements for the
Amiga.
When Word Perfect announced their intentions on showing a very enhanced
version of Word Perfect at AmiExpo last year, they had every intention of
doing so … here's what happened.
WP ported the UNIX version of WP to the Amiga. It was/is very powerful
with lots of features. The problem is that it required 2M of ram and a
hard disk to run. WP worked closely with CBM to try to get the required
memory usage down. They tried to go with overlays but the program just was
not structured to use overlays — needed functions might not be in the
overlay currently loaded. They couldn't get the size down.
In a mood helplessness, more than anything else, WP concluded that there
just aren't enough Amigas out there with a minimum of 2M and a hard disk.
They dropped further Amiga development due to their perception of a market
too small for the hardware configuration that was required.
Is their reading of the market correct? I don't know. I do know that my
machine more than meets their requirments — am I atypical?
I don't know if anything could change their corporate policy at this point.
However, a letter/email writing campaign can't hurt. If you've got the
required hardware and you want an enhanced Word Perfect — WRITE THEM AND
TELL THEM SO! Pete Peterson, executive Vice President of Word Perfect
Corp. is a "fixture" on CompuServe — his user id is 72067,3552 — flood
his mailbox! While this may not change anything it might enlighten them a
bit to know that not all Amiga owners are 512k 500 game players. In your
letters, whether paper or email, be polite but forceful in letting them
know you'd buy their product if it were available.