"Arguably, WordPerfect 5.1 was that company's definitive "sophisticated" product - especially if you count profitability and market-share."
There's an old saying that good things come in threes. Let's expand on that maxim and say that the third and fifth versions of nearly any product will prove to be the best.
There's plenty of evidence that this is true.
For one thing, really bad products usually don't make it to a third revision, so in a sort of market-driven evolution, only the strong survive. And it's widely held among consumers - especially computer hardware and software users - that version 1.0 of anything is full of holes and unfulfilled promises - the original Apple Newton, for example, or Windows 1.0. Of course, the Web era has ushered in the increasingly commonplace concept of "public beta" releases that theoretically take the place of the 1.0 releases of yesteryear, but even "beta" is now a term forsaken by marketing mavens who prefer to term their incomplete and not-ready-for-prime-time products as "Platform Previews" or Preview Releases." At any rate, 1.0 versions get bought by the pioneers who apparently like those arrows in their backs, inadequate support and all the other glitches that come as part of the package. Sooner or later, the second version follows, addressing the truly grievous problems of the initial release and adding "must-have" features. If all goes well, the reviewers (notorious optimists that we are) give it the thumbs up and the mass market starts to take notice.
Now, we have a product with legs, and it crawls out of the ooze. By the time it gets to Version 3, it has usually evolved into a versatile but not yet unduly bloated - nor truly sophisticated - product.
Those products that do make it past the third version, unfortunately, often succumb to featuritis - if the past is any indication.
Look at the evidence:
Who used MS-DOS 1.0? Version 2.11 through 3.3 were the versions that most "early adopters" got used to, and it was Version 5 that really represented a mature product. Version 4 of MS-DOS represented a classic misstep: laggardly performance and feature bloat. Version 5, for the most part, set things right.
CorelDraw is another good example. Version 3 was the first really good one. It remained on the market for many years (even after Version 4 and Version 5 were available).
Version 4 was, in most users' estimation, an overly large box of problems and Version 5 represented a highly usable version that, even today, many shops stick with as their choice (we happen to like CorelDraw 7, though). The fact that each version of CorelDraw usually takes about five "fixes" to get to a reasonably reliable state is an ancillary issue we won't explore here.
Windows, of course, is the classic example. Version 3 (3.1 in particular) was the first time it all clicked, and Version 5 - which, by our counting is Windows 95 OSR2 - is another solid release. Like many products that make it past their fifth generation, Microsoft's challenge is to add value to the sixth and subsequent versions of its products that make them a compelling buy. As we saw with DOS, after you've bundled a bunch of extras with Version 6.x, there isn't much left to do.
It is not too much of a gamble to predict that Windows NT will follow this mega-pattern, as version 3.x - the first version to gain wide acceptance - finally reaches what we think will be its first true fruition with Version 5.0 - plus service pack whatever.
Arguably, WordPerfect 5.1 was that company's definitive "sophisticated" product - especially if you count profitability and market-share. Microsoft Word version 6.0 for the Mac was a classic example of a 6.0 release that failed to capture the imagination and dollars of users as the previous 5.1 release had done.
Now, with WordPerfect 8.0, Word 97, and all the other "post-Web" word processors on the market, perhaps we'll have to come up with a theory for eights and nines.
It is amusing - even when it doesn't always work - to think of the ways that other technologies evolve in this way. Storage devices, printers, modems, Web browsers, CPUs (where, amazingly, you can start with almost any model and see that it technologically peters out after three, and is discontinued or reconstructed after six revisions) - even the careers of famous people often pan out this way.
Look, for example, at the musical careers and breakups of the Beatles, The Who, or just about any artist who self-destructed. The third period is one of artistic maturation, followed by a dark period of difficulty, followed by a triumphant masterwork - and then, more often than not, the system collapses.
In cases like these, it is best to generalize the third, fourth and fifth periods as "golden age," "dark ages" and "glory days" and so on. Using this conceptual framework, we can map the pattern to everything from Artisoft or Apple Computer to western civilization in general. While you are wise to be skeptical of any system that seeks to simplify that which is massively complex, if we take the broad view - such mega-patterns do exist.
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