ALMOST PERFECT

How the Utah software empire of WordPerfect was built from scratch by three graduates of Brigham Young University. Peterson, the company's original marketing director, was booted out in 1992, just as the firm topped $500 million in sales. WordPerfect—the 80's most wildly successful word-processing product—began in 1977 as an idle summer project by an underemployed Brigham Young computer-science instructor named Alan Ashton. When the program miraculously worked on the mainframe computers that were then the norm, he hired Bruce Bastion (the author's brother-in-law and a college band leader) to help sell it, and the author (then part-owner of a failing drapery store) to be business manager and marketing guru at $5.00 an hour. A few years later, Ashton and Bastion appeared on the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people and—in spite of predictable but fascinating fumbles and glitches—sales were soaring and the company couldn't hire programmers and support personnel quickly enough. But in addition to a fast-flowing stream of new PC- compatible WordPerfect products, the company launched a series of secondary products with names like P-Edit, MathPlan, SSI*Data, SSI*Forth, and InForms—all of which failed. Meanwhile, Peterson- -desperately trying to promote all the new software while maintaining a semblance of order in a corporation now 600-strong and full of turf wars and chaos—became something of a tyrant. In the final battle—fought over distribution strategy for WordPerfect 5.0—he lost and was abruptly out: ``There was dancing in the aisles of some departments.'' Nevertheless, he shares his painfully acquired management philosophy in an afterword. A well-written and often hair-raising tale of serendipitous software success, given a special timeliness by the comparable corporate shake-out at Apple, including the firing of longtime chief John Sculley. (First printing of 25,000)