Before they got really really bad

"For a long time Softletter Editor Jeffrey Tarter used to publish an annual list of the hundred largest personal computer software publishers called the Soft-letter 100. Here's what the top ten looked like in 1984:"

OK, Microsoft is number 2, but it is one of a handful of companies with roughly similar annual revenues.

What we can also see: the PC is a Textprocessor (by this I decidedly do no mean to say Symbolprocessor), even more than a numbers processor (namely by spreadsheeting) and more than a graphic bits' processor. You'd have a harder time proving this today (and in the above table you could also ad Lotus' and Visicalc's revenues, but then you would not see all the other text processing money), just think of MS-Office though, thoroughly. Wordprocessing did not originate with the PC as did the Spreadsheet but was probably even more of a reason for PCs in offices than that famous "Killer Application.

WordPerfect was not even in this list, as we see, nevertheless took the market away from MicroPro 2 years later. Her I have 2 interesting quotations from one of their history chapters: by their former CFO W.E. Peterson

"I remember when a few of us were eating lunch at the local Sizzler, an eavesdropper interrupted to say, "Are you guys writing a word processor for the PC? So are we." So was everyone else. At least 200 companies would introduce a word processor for the IBM PC within the next two years. Most of these products would never make money, because the market would get very crowded very quickly, but our risk of failure was not as great as most of these other companies. Already many of our Data General customers were planning to buy IBM PC's and hoping to use SSI*WP on them."

"We learned a lot from watching Lotus do it the right way. They spent about half a million dollars developing 1-2-3, which was approximately the same amount of money we spent in developing the DG and PC versions of WordPerfect. They spent about two million dollars on their 1-2-3 roll-out; their ads, brochures, packaging, distribution, and public relations were all very professionally done. We, however, spent only $100,000 on our roll-out and generally looked like amateurs at everything we did. 1-2-3 would become the most popular spreadsheet as soon as it was released. We would need five years to become the most popular word processor."

This last one as well as Apples famous 1984 superbowl spot shed some light on marketing in the PC world.

One funny last little thing: Broderbund was still #12 in 1998. I have only a file softletter98 (text/html, 519 KB) from Google's cache to prove that.