While Philippe Kahn was being ravished by the object-oriented light, Microsoft released its Office suite in 1991 for a retail price of around $495.00 and immediately began to do serious damage to its competitors in the business applications market. Microsoft Office was not so much a well-thought-out strategy as it was an attempt by Microsoft to punish Borland for all those competitive upgrade promotions the company was constantly launching at its software rivals. When the suite was first introduced, firms such as Borland, Lotus, and WordPerfect proclaimed their confidence in the best-of-breed theory of software purchasing. Customers, they said, would reject a cobbled-together bundle of inferior software in favor of buying the best product from the best company and rely on Windows and their own ingenuity to achieve whatever integration between applications they felt was needed.
The only problem with this theory was that the competition didn’t have the best-of-breed products; Microsoft did. Though Quattro was always well rated by the press and usually beat Lotus 1-2-3 in head-to-head competitions, it almost invariably was an also-ran to the top-ranked product, Microsoft Excel. WordPerfect’s botched release of its first Windows-based word processor had landed the one-time ruler of the category in third place. First and second places were usually fought over by Microsoft Word and Lotus’s AmiPro. Microsoft PowerPoint and Lotus Freelance usually struggled for the business presentation graphics crown, but the spreadsheet and word-processing elements were the most important factors in a buyer’s decision. Advantage: Microsoft.
Both Borland and WordPerfect attempted to fight back with competing office suites assembled from each other’s respective products (with SPC’s faded Harvard Graphics thrown into the mix), but they were unsuccessful. Not surprisingly, the new suites lacked the integration of Microsoft Office, but more important, they were bundles of second-and third-class programs competing against top-ranked contenders. Lotus SmartSuite faced a similar problem. Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows never placed higher than second in competitive face-offs and usually came in third place (a shocking comedown for the one-time category leader). AmiPro sometimes outplaced Microsoft Word, but Lotus was, after all, the spreadsheet company. Freelance usually placed second to PowerPoint in reviews, and the suite’s database, Approach, although a decent product, wasn’t well known and brought little extra credibility to the package.