Returned to computers, bearded again, Barnaby in early 1983 was working for a small rival of MicroPro, Chang Laboratories, aiming at the lucrative market for software compatible with IBM’s 16-bit PC. He was like a canny Hollywood scriptwriter. Barnaby was somewhat vague about his software plans, in part because he really did not know what he would create in the end, but perhaps also because he did not want to alert the competition. He would not, in early 1983, say he was working on a new word processor, only that he was at the keyboard of his new IBM. It ran WordStar. Barnaby, like thousands of other people, had bought his IBM version at a local ComputerLand store. You might say it was the neat completion of a circle, for the founder of the ComputerLand chain was none other than Bill Millard, the man behind IMSAI, Barnaby’s former employer.
Barnaby offered his opinion of the WordStar version he had bought at ComputerLand—competent but unimaginative. Well, how could he outdo his WordStar? Barnaby answered, and despite his refusal to be pinned down on a future project (“It could be a spreadsheet”), he gave at least an inkling of what another word processor from him could be like.
Among other things, Barnaby would take advantage of the newer machines’ more powerful memories; he’d write more instructions for the RAM. So he wouldn’t have to choose as much between making the program either (1) more easily understood or (2) capable of moving around words in the fastest or most efficient way. Smart computers and dumb humans could coexist more gracefully.
Also, he’d reduce the number of commands in WordStar, a good idea if not overdone. “I’ve thought, Gee, couldn’t I have only two or three ways of deleting text rather than twenty. And I look at my habits, and I do use a lot of them. But most of them I could replace with the same number of keystrokes or only one more keystroke using a combination of other commands. I’d never tried to write a program where you didn’t have to read the manual before. And I still don’t think I’ve succeeded. I think that’s a worthy goal for the future—to write a program that doesn’t have to have a manual.”[manual.”]
Back at MicroPro, Rubinstein, by early 1983, had fallen behind some previous goals of his own. Fewer than 250 people worked for the company, or less than half the peak number, and the company had saddled itself earlier with hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in office leases it no longer needed. “There were some odd things that happened internally with these visions of increasing numbers of sales,” said a former MicroPro man, “and they hired too many people too quickly. They pay very well, and their salesmen were getting incredible commissions. I know one guy—his first month in sales he took home five grand in commissions.” Did he sustain that amount? “He didn’t,” said the ex-MicroPro employee. “Every month after that he fell.” And so, it seemed, did the sales rep’s colleagues at MicroPro. “They kept trying to break record after record,” the former employee recalled, “and the only way to do it was to extend generous credit and get their products out the door.... They had to produce all the programs people ordered, but they weren’t getting their money immediately.” With high interest rates, some buyers would stall payments as long as possible. MicroPro’s growth problems weren’t unique. Another pioneer in micro software, Lifeboat Associates, a distributor, also found itself overexpanded and laid off employees.
MicroPro likewise suffered when programmers, ordered to meet Rubinstein’s deadline, cut corners on an early version of WordStar for the IBM PC. The software was too hard to adapt to customers’ printers. And then IBM threw MicroPro a loop. It suddenly changed the PC’s operating system in a way that made WordStar glitch up. MicroPro wasn’t the culprit here. And yet it was the one receiving angry phone calls from frustrated customers. It was, in a sense, a victim of its own reputation for quality. MicroPro products had bugs like other software makers’, but fewer of them than most, so that the IBM WordStar problems—since corrected—enraged customers with high expectations.
Old friends of Rubinstein’s, meanwhile, complained that the firm had nothing truly original coming out, that MicroPro had evolved from a programming company to a marketing one. I disagreed somewhat. MicroPro had succeeded largely because Rubinstein had aggressively sold himself and his programs. And yet it was also true no other MicroPro product had commanded as much attention as WordStar, the first big one. Michael Canyes, a computer consultant, complained that it was “getting a little gray around the temples.” It was time for updates, drastic ones. If they didn’t come, if competitors kept duplicating various features of WordStar, the program would eventually perish.
So far, however, that hadn’t happened.
Nothing had appeared that was both as good as WordStar and marketed as successfully.
“If you’d asked me when I first introduced it,” Barnaby said, “I would have said as soon as we stopped moving, somebody would have done something better. I sort of thought WordStar would be gone by now, but it’s growing instead. It may sell a million by the time it’s done.” He wasn’t bragging; he was right.