> WordPerfect competed heavily with Microsoft Word back in the DOS days.

Ha! I'd say it was more accurate to say that MS Word tried to compete with WordPerfect.

It was only with the rise of Windows that Word became a contender, and WordPerfect was relegated to trying to compete.

> a straight port of the text-only DOS version.

Just out of interest: WP was a Data General app. The DOS version was a port, as was the Amiga version, SCO Xenix, classic MacOS, all the others. The native app was a DG minicomputer program.

Part of its competitiveness in the pre-GUI era was that WordPerfect was very portable and the company ported it to almost every OS going, complete with its massive suite of state-of-the-art printer drivers.

If you were not using a DG Nova minicomputer then you were running a port.

But as GUIs became standard, they almost all included printing subsystems, using soft fonts rendered by the same code that rendered stuff on screen. Printers' own built-in fonts became irrelevant: GUIs just dumped bitmaps to the printer.

So WordPerfect's best-in-the-industry printer drivers, which supported every printer in the world and could make it do backflips, became irrelevant.