Whilst a business is typically spoiled for choice when it comes to IT hardware, communications, networking and other vital services, typically the office suite of choice is the same for nearly every company.
Since its launch in the late 1980s, Microsoft Office (now 365) is nigh-ubiquitous, to the point that the only alternatives that are widely used tend to be for specialist purposes.
However, despite being the biggest, Office was not necessarily the first, and there is an alternate future where every computer runs a copy of MicroPro Starburst rather than Office.
MicroPro International was the company responsible for WordStar, the first hugely successful word processor ever made.
Part of the reason for this is that it could be made to run on basically any business computer of the era and the other part was that it was amongst the first successful office applications bundled with computers, most notably the Osborne 1 and Kaypro lines of prototype laptops.
Its popularity is such that some authors, most notably George R.R. Martin, still use it to this day despite having not been updated for over 30 years. Intellectual William F Buckley wryly noted that whilst he was told there were better word processors, he compared it to being told there was a better alphabet.
Despite an infamous reputation for complexity, it also was the first to show line breaks and show
how a document would look when printed, as well as a mail merge function years before Microsoft Word would.
All of this meant that by 1984, MicroPro was the biggest software company in North America and it just as quickly fell apart.
They planned to release Starburst at some point in 1984, which was a standalone program that integrated WordStar, spreadsheet CalcStar and database InfoStar.
However, just at the time it looked like the company was heading into the future, founder Seymour Rubinstein had a heart attack and venture capitalist Fred Adler made him sign a document that converted his stock options into non-voting stock, removing his influence.
Mr Adler’s first move was to cancel Starburst, a controversial decision at the time that may have
doomed the company outright in hindsight. Wordstar 2000 was widely criticised and by that point, the market had become dominated by WordPerfect and later Microsoft Word and Office.