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The passage of time has healed much, but W.E. "Pete" Peterson will never forget March 23, 1992, the day his world imploded.
That spring morning also may have been the high-water mark for the world's then most popular word processor, WordPerfect. But no one at the time suspected it - not Peterson, nor his majority partners Alan Ashton and Bruce Bastian, who had called that day's 10:30 a.m. shareholders meeting.
Three hours later, Peterson's years at the helm of WordPerfect Corp. ended. "I felt numb," he would later write.
He would soon have company. Within three months, WordPerfect lost its lead in the word-processing market to Microsoft's upstart Word; it was sold to neighboring Novell in June 1994, only to end up property of Canada's Corel 18 months later.
Since then, WordPerfect has been the wraith of the office suite world, forecasts of a competitive return undercut by Corel's own financial turmoil. But now, 12 years after sinking into a sort of corporate limbo, the Ottawa, Ontario-based Corel swears WordPerfect's resurrection is finally at hand.
"Last year we divested some subdivisions that were not generating revenue and put 50 percent of our focus back behind WordPerfect," said Richard Carriere, general manager for Office Productivity at Corel. "It's been a big change in our dynamics. We've spent a lot of time in the market talking to customers and we are finally ready."
In April, following up on earlier breakthrough software bundling deals with computer makers Dell and Hewlett-Packard, Corel released WordPerfect Office 12 to rave reviews.
"We're being very aggressive," Carriere says. "Our user base, which was shrinking year by year, is now growing back. Today we have 20 million users worldwide, up to 4 million more than a year ago."
Tough recovery: That is still a far cry from the more than 150 million users of Microsoft Word and Office products, but as any mad scientist knows, reanimation of a corpse takes time.
"We're still in the early stages of stabilizing the business," Carriere says. "But there's no doubt now that we are getting serious about getting back into play."
If so, Microsoft will not deign to comment on the return of a once-vanquished foe. Neither will the world's largest software maker answer claims that WordPerfect and its office suite - particularly its latest versions - are superior to Word and Microsoft Office.
Perhaps Bill Gates and Co. are waiting to see if this Corel crusade will unravel as others have in the past.
Corel's first effort to whip a then still-reeling WordPerfect back into the ring with Word, shortly after acquiring the program in 1996, was an unmitigated disaster. Corel was forced into massive layoffs, and company founder Michael Cowpland came under Canadian securities regulators' scrutiny. He left Corel in 2000.
What followed was a period of promotional false starts and corporate missteps, until finally, Vector Capital bought the struggling company in August 2003 and took it private, voluntarily delisting it from the Nasdaq and Toronto stock exchanges.
Under new chief executive Amish Mehta, Corel has recommitted to WordPerfect, which he sees as "the clear choice for value-conscious consumers . . . seeking a full-featured, value-priced office suite that can co-exist within a Microsoft environment."
Time, and sales receipts, will soon tell whether Mehta and Corel are right. Peterson, for one, hopes they are; prospects for an end to WordPerfect's twilight would make his memories less bittersweet.
"They kicked me out at just the right time to make me look good," Peterson says. "Had I stayed, I think I could have prolonged the sinking, but Microsoft would still have had the top-selling Windows product."
The past in perspective: In retrospect, he also agrees Ashton and Bastian made the right decision that fateful day in 1992. Peterson now acknowledges his aggressive management style had irritated some, and understands the concerns of others that his control of marketing and sales concentrated too much power in his hands.
"It was very hard at first," Peterson admits. "But I was able to get to know my six children a lot better and was able to be a better husband. [And] I needed to learn to be more humble."
Still, at the time he counted on WordPerfect's stunning success to counter any criticism. After all, he had helped launch the Orem company in 1980 as one of only six employees scraping by on $20,000 a month in sales. He had seen it grow by 1991 into a company with $533 million in sales and more than 4,000 employees.
WordPerfect held an industry-leading 50 percent of the word-processing market and had, along with neighboring networking giant Novell Inc., helped make Utah County rival Silicon Valley for computer commerce.
But by mid-1992, Word for Windows caught WordPerfect in market share. By the end of the year, positions switched: Word claimed the 40 percent mark and was rapidly expanding its lead on WordPerfect, at 25 percent and declining, according to research gathered by Stan Liebowitz, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas.
WordPerfect's belated shift away from DOS to rush out versions for the increasingly dominant Windows operating system was too late. By 1994, it held less than 10 percent of the market; when Word topped 90 percent in 1997 - a level it maintains to this day - WordPerfect was barely a blip on the radar.
Long before that, Peterson - as well as Ashton and Bastian - had sold their stock for unspecified millions.
Ashton, now serving as president of the LDS Church mission for West Toronto, argues there were multiple reasons for WordPerfect's fall.
"Our being behind in getting out our graphics WordPerfect for Windows hurt us," he says. Then "they bundled a number of their products: Word, Powerpoint and Excel, and literally gave them away."
Now a philanthropist and national gay rights activist, Bastian agrees that WordPerfect - immersed in developing releases for its DOS core, as well as IBM's ill-fated OS/2 and the Macintosh operating systems - was "late going to Windows.
"But WordPerfect on Windows was superior to Word, and still is," he adds. Microsoft, by initially giving away Word to Windows buyers, made the decision on word processors "a business decision [that was] all about money. "WordPerfect, despite price cuts and promotions, still could not give its products away.
"What toppled WordPerfect? To me, that is easy. What toppled 90 percent of the successful software companies at that time? Microsoft," Bastian counters. "When Microsoft started putting everything under the Windows umbrella, other products all had a hard time of it."
Peterson, who remains cordial with Bastian despite their long-ago boardroom dustup, agrees.
"The seeds of our decline were sown when Microsoft decided to make Windows [rather than the original DOS format] the playing field," Peterson says. "We did not have a choice, because PC customers were going to use Windows no matter what we did."
Since his departure, Peterson has self-published a book, Almost Perfect, on his former company's rise and fall; helped produce LDS Church-related music projects; and developed a number of software programs, including Yeah Write, an award-winning word processor available for downloading at http://www.yeahwrite.com.
Product pride, longevity: Bastian remains devoted to WordPerfect, though long removed from the corporate boardrooms where he, Ashton and Peterson became rich.
"I still use WordPerfect. I buy it. I will never use Word; it is and always has been an inferior product," Bastian declares.
Bastian is far from being alone as a WordPerfect diehard. Because of its arguably superior features for easily revealing text code and formatting documents in a variety of legal formats, WordPerfect continues as a favorite in federal and state government circles.
"The Utah Legislature and Attorney General's Office continue to use WordPerfect," says Val Oveson, chief state information officer. "That's despite a 1999 general state policy moving to Word."
While about 80 percent of state workers complied, WordPerfect users have thwarted wholesale changeovers. Oveson admits he has acquiesced, and now favors a compromise: asking users of both programs to save their data in a neutral format, such as Adobe's widely used PDF platform.
Still, Oveson and others are closely watching Corel's recent efforts to resurrect WordPerfect. The Canadian company recently made a deal with Dell to ship WordPerfect Office with its mail-order PCs.
"WordPerfect is not dead," Oveson says. "And the fact that WordPerfect grew up in Utah also gives it staying power here. There is still a perception of quality, and loyalty to it that are intangibles."