WordPerfect couldn't even work well with itself and bungled the transition from DOS to GUI hard. Word's biggest advantage was that it worked great on Windows, while WordPerfect had to tiptoe around offending their existing DOS experts.
History repeats itself in office suites (or at least rhymes) - the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful.
One of the problems was that most companies where developing OS/2 version of their apps, as Microsoft had promised that was the future, while Microsoft was building Windows apps. By the time they realized their mistake, it was already too late.
I still remember how many minutes it took to boot WordPerfect on the schools 486DX2 66Mhz ... I could time it to play a round of doom on another machine next to it.
I'm guessing that was loading over the LAN, as that's the only time I recall seeing multi-minute load times on a DX2. In that scenario, the speed of the computer was largely irrelevant, as files were being pulled from a NetWare server (reading files of very slow spinning disks) over a 10Mb shared media ethernet network.
> the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful
To be fair, the real "competition" that the Ribbon displaced wasn't just menus, it was toolbars. Yes, the toolbar sections were arbitrary, but so were ribbon sections. Massive amounts of cheese moved, causing lots of confusion, and it also took way more screen real-estate. In Office, it was a net loss IMO.
In the File Explorer, the ribbon was a disaster, in practice if not necessarily in theory.
I wasn't offended by the switch, but it definitely felt like an unforced error.
I am a slow typist, and I found that I could get ahead of WordPerfect 6 on Windows 95. Truly good typists must have found this to be a problem. I'm not sure how otherwise the 5.1 diehards were offended, though.
History repeats itself in office suites (or at least rhymes) - the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful.