You can't blame MS for WordPerfect's failure. This story repeats ad infinitum - WordPerfect had a large body of users who had already memorized the alt-shift-F8 combos and didn't want change. They were in no hurry to alienate their established base. Microsoft gets credit here, they saw the future that WordPerfect and Lotus didn't.
Name one widely used (in the west) website that used Java applets. I can name exactly one, because I worked on the backend for it, but even in 2002 everyone knew it was an odd duck. Flash was still popular, activex still around, but ajax was a thing and everyone knew it was the future. Applets were a joke.
The market doesn't really care about your opinion of what is/isn't a mistake. Sorry.
They introduced Win95 and would not allow WordPerfect access until it was public while building office which meant it took them 6 months to port over to windows 95. WordPerfect wasn't able to recover.
Name one widely used (in the west) website that used Java applets. I can name exactly one, because I worked on the backend for it, but even in 2002 everyone knew it was an odd duck. Flash was still popular, activex still around, but ajax was a thing and everyone knew it was the future. Applets were a joke.
The market doesn't really care about your opinion of what is/isn't a mistake. Sorry.