Much like any other field of business, computer-based office workers need the right tools for the right job, and dedicated local IT support services help not only with the choice of the right software but also ensure it is installed and well-supported.

For the most part, the main decisions made will revolve around suites of office applications, as well as arranging the licensing of other software packages for specific job roles such as modelling software for 3D printing, graphic design for production and video editing for marketing and content management.

When it comes to the former most businesses will choose the tools they are familiar with, which has led to a calcification of the market and left Microsoft 365 (the former Microsoft Office) as the dominant tool of choice for many businesses.

However, whilst it is the most common choice, it is far from the only option available. There are dozens of office application suites available and whilst their active user bases are microscopic in comparison to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, they are still actively updated and have become standard in some industries.

Here are a few examples and why they have become so notable.

WordPerfect

In the 1980s, the ultimate unofficial office suite consisted of WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3 and dBase, which were considered to be the de facto standard for word processing, spreadsheets and databases respectively.

Despite being considered a relic from a previous age of computers, not only is it still used but it is still actively being updated, much to the shock of technology writers.

In an age before Windows was the standard operating system for business, WordPerfect was the cleanest and most usable word processor for industries rapidly pivoting to using computers.

It had the best keyboard-oly interface, the most diverse support for different drivers and could even be used as a typewriter interface to aid with adoption.

However, it had a decade of struggles transitioning to Windows, in part because they were slow to make the transition from command-line DOS to graphical user interfaces.

WordPerfect 5.1 in 1991 was notoriously unstable and by the time the updated WordPerfect 5.2 was out in 1992, Microsoft Word for Windows was already starting to garner serious attention as part of the Microsoft Office suite.

The function keys often clashed with Windows’ own system interface, and the big selling point of printer drivers became a moot point as Windows used its own, wider range of program-agnostic drivers.

WordPerfect 7 in 1995 was so poorly received that the software’s owner, Novell, sued Microsoft for anti-competitive business practices, a suit only closed in 2014. WordPerfect went from a 50 per cent market share to less than five per cent in 2000.

However, its familiar interface, macros, and reveal codes have made it popular with legal firms and government offices, to the point that it is standard issue for the United States Department of Justice and the French judiciary as of 2024.

StarOffice

Unlike WordPerfect, which appeals to a very distinct and small niche audience, StarOffice became widely used by fundamentally changing its approach to business software as the result of rather unusual financial incentives.

StarOffice began as StarWriter, a word processor made by Marco Borries when he was just 16 years old, and at its peak accounted for a quarter of all office suite sales in Germany.

Its appeal was primarily based on price. Whilst it was a capable application suite, the fact it cost a quarter of the price of Office for largely the same functionality was notable, but what is somewhat shocking is that a huge number of people use StarWriter today, albeit not by that name.

In 1999, Mr Borries’ company Star Division was bought by Sun Microsystems for $73.5m, but what was notable about this purchase was not the price, but the reason behind the price and what they did next with it.

Sun Microsystems is a huge computer company that at the time had 42,000 employees. Each and every one of these needed a copy of Microsoft Office, and Sun apparently figured out that the overall cost was so great that it would be cheaper to just buy a competing piece of software.

More notably than this, StarOffice followed a similar approach to Netscape by releasing the software’s source code for free to allow programmers to use the underlying code to make their own similar office suites, whilst also selling StarOffice as trialware that could be bought at a much lower cost.

StarOffice’s open source form became OpenOffice.org and has since been used in Collabora Office and LibreOffice, continuing a chain of regularly updated office software from 1985.