Microsoft Word was a loser, but then they changed out the operating system under the winners.
Word Perfect had the OS changed from under them but also had every warning that the change was coming and refused to move to sturdier ground.
It was pretty easy to write off Windows 3.1, and continue to be a solid solution on MS-DOS and with Netware, etc.
But Windows 95 had a lot of fanfare in advance that suggested it would have much better uptake. And Windows NT in parallel was developing a credible foundation, and it got the "new shell" as an option around the time of Win95. My recollection at the time was that the writing should've been on the wall, that Windows was going to be the Microsoft platform.
If WordPerfect was slow to move, that's a bad combination with, er, not as direct of access to the platform teams.
20 years later I'm still programming in Python.
It took more than a decade. They basically built out the features and waited until their competitors made some strategic mistake, of which they made several in that decade.
It was pretty much the same with Netscape and MSIE. That monopoly misuse probably helped, but Netscape also seemed bent on killing itself. Despite the mismanagement, it still took almost five years.
Perl was more popular than Python for more than a decade. Having much of the early web developed on it didn't help in the long run. First mover advantage might be a thing, but it never wins in the long run. And in the long run, ten years is nothing.