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Jon DeVaan's avatar

On the point of, "is not enough for the competitor to drop the ball, but someone had to be there to pick it up." The Office 95 release was the culmination of Lotus and WordPerfect dropping the ball not once (slow to adopt GUI), but twice (under resourced or slow to adopt suites). Microsoft was there to pick up the ball both times. One could argue that Office 4 had already shown this, but Windows 95 made PCs much more popular and Office 95 was there to take all of the share from people who weren't already fans of 1-2-3 or WordPerfect. Then the fans were overwhelmed by all the other users and eventually switched. Although, I still run into people who are diehard users.

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Kirk Glerum's avatar

I remember some marketer - sorry, forget who - explaining how much work they'd done to see to it that on launch day, every store had a pallet of Office95 right next to the pallet of Win95. The hype was for Windows - people weren't lining up for Office - but boy they reached out and bought a copy just the same. Huge win.

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