Pete Peterson's Farewell to WordPerfect

Almost from its inception, W. E. "Pete" Peterson was the visible face of WordPerfect. He started with the company as a $5 an hour part-time office manager and stayed with them, leaving reluctantly, really not by choice, in March 1992, when the company was the Number One Word Processing vendor and was one of the five largest software companies, with revenues in excess of $500 million per year.

In his fascinating (and poignant) book AlmostPerfect (Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA, 1994), Pete tells his side of the story and, it seems to me, having observed most of it -- as analyst, consultant, and friend -- that he's been amazingly candid about both WordPerfect and himself. You have to have been there to know that when he always blames product and not marketing he's saying it was the other guy's fault.

But WordPerfect was a place, during Peterson's times, where no employee could be hired without his financial okay, where the very organizational structure was run according to his notion of how it should be done and where outside consultants (who might have given the insular company some advice about what was going on in the real world outside) were considered an unnecessary expense or useless. This means some of the reasons for WordPerfect's fumbling their initial entry to the Windows market must be, at least in part, set on his doorstep.

Peterson is dead right when he points out WordPerfect's deadly lack of focus, writing programs for multiple categories (spreadsheets, databases) that few customers wanted to buy from them. But it was his reluctance to understand the opportunities in the EMail market -- and the differential needs for large customer marketing and support in that market -- which placed WordPerfect at a disadvantage against Microsoft and Lotus, who understood the big customer game very well.

In fact, it is fitting that I read AlmostPerfect almost simultaneously with pondering the acquisition of WordPerfect by Novell, and the future plans for WordPerfect espoused by Novell's new CEO. In the final analysis, WordPerfect decided that the big IPO wasn't the way it could go -- possibly because it's profitability had continued to slip -- and that an acquisition by a company who could take advantage of its technology and support the marketing and ongoing technical support for increasingly complex multi-user applications was a good alternative. Pete Peterson would have hated to be a Novell Vice President, I suspect.

There are some great insights here into what happened in the early days of the PC software industry. Tread lightly however, when Peterson offers you his management philosophy. I doubt that his demands for cheerful employees and his preachy management style, with its limited opportunities for autonomy and advancement would appeal to many of the entrepreneurial spirits you'll want to attract if you're trying to build the next great software company.

Whatever Pete does next, we wish him well. His achievements at WordPerfect were extraordinary and the fact that he was the wrong man to take WordPerfect to the next level does nothing to lessen the good job he had already done.

If you've reached this page, obviously you like to read and buy books. For your convenience, we have established a link that will allow you to order this book from Amazon.com. You should be aware that we receive a small commission for this service, but that our goal is to make it easy for you to purchase the books we review.

If you are interested in ordering:
Almost Perfect (hard to find), click here