Small Fish, Big Pond

This old ad I saw from Wired Reread reminded me of a recent discovery I made.

I found out that the really nice Technology Park I work at used to be WordPerfect Headquarters.

Old timers know the significance but new computer users may not. WordPerfect was the killer app to have on an IBM PC computer back in the 80’s and 90’s. Along with Quattro Pro they made up the dominant office applications that made a PC worth owning (besides SkiFree).

However the 800lb gorilla, Microsoft, bundled a group of office programs in a suite that had limited interoperability between them. While initially an inferior product the simple interaction between word docs and spreadsheets was too powerful of a feature and WordPerfect and Quattro Pro fell before the Microsoft Juggernaut.

Today the owners of WP spend their immense wealth on a giant arboretum/garden/golf course at the north end of Utah Valley. The office park was sold and now the building are leased out to other tech companies. AT&T where I’m soon to be unemployed, Omniture which was recently acquired by Adobe, Bungee Labs, Intuit, Open Solutions, Orange Soda, and some other startups.

From a tech history perspective it’s kind of amazing being among the “ruins” of a company that ran a virtual monopoly on the tech landscape in the heyday of the PC.

Imagine working at 1 Infinite Loop Cupertino 20 years in the future at the GoogleSkynet building, data-mining personal information to fuel the US-China Ad War, and spending your lunch break reminiscing about when people here were so worked up over a phone that could surf the internet.

In today’s high-paced tech world nobody can remember back 3 years let alone 20-30 years. But it’s good to remind yourself from time to time that the latest tablet craze, or Google’s latest move into *blank* technology is just a passing moment that will be forgotten in less than half a generation. And in the future people will look back amused at us just like we do when we think back to a day when a simple word-processing application would be the main reason people got desktop computers.

An overcast day at the old WP site.