Jeremy Allison, co-creator of Samba, records that 'In the days when Novell Netware dominated the file serving world Microsoft was a great supporter of standards. Windows NT 3.1 was far from perfect, but it was 'good enough' and Microsoft's marketing arm was 'good enough' to paper over the considerable cracks until Linux and Samba came along to offer the possibility of a more resilient alternative. Compared to NetWare's advanced networking functionality, Microsoft Windows for Workgroups was two tin cans and a piece of string, but Windows NT changed all that. Productivity suites may have been the initial attraction that drew the desktop PC into the office, but the cement was the workgroup tools pioneered by Novell, which all but disappeared when Windows NT joined the party.

This was a fate that befell many of Microsoft's competitors before and after WordPerfect's demise. The company was sold to Novell that year for $1.4 billion, but Novell passed it on to Corel 18 months later for just $20 million in cash and $100 million in stock. It possessed a large and loyal user base in both the commercial and personal consumer markets but, by 1994, its share of the word processor market had begun to crumble in the face of a remorseless marketing campaign by Microsoft, aided and abetted by Microsoft's dominance of the PC operating system market. At the time WordPerfect was generally acknowledged to be the superior product. It and carried the admirable motto: 'We teach correct principles and our employees teach themselves.' But, by general consensus, the company ultimately failed because it was too nice a company, and Microsoft succeeded because it was too persistent and ruthless a competitor.

During the 1980 the markets for 'productivity suites' had been dominated by Lotus 1-2-3, VisiCalc and WordPerfect, but all were to fall by the wayside and become mere shadows of their former selves. The tools that brought the PC into the office were the word processor and the spreadsheet, and not the DOS-based operating systems, which were only as sophisticated as they needed to be, and not as sophisticated as they should have been. The pivotal year for the mass adoption of the desktop PC was probably 1995, the year of Windows 95, when Microsoft finally took complete charge of the office.

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