GlobalView was an integrated “desktop environment” including word-processing, desktop-publishing, and simple calculation (spreadsheet) and database functionality.
Initially, GlobalView required an additional processor on a PC expansion card; it was late run using emulation.
Though the software it was based on had once been far ahead of its time (in terms of its integration and use of a graphical user interface), the high cost of the processor and later low speed of the emulator doomed it to poor sales (almost exclusively old customers of the Alto and Star, recognized as precursors of the Apple Macintosh but in themselves expensive corporate niche machines).
He said that the lack of freedom for third-party software "to develop a separate identity" meant that they would be "invisible" like expansion cards.
Alsop believed that ViewPoint had changed little from the original Xerox PARC technology created more than ten years earlier, because (unlike Apple and Microsoft's "hundreds of thousands of users") not enough consumers had used it to give Xerox feedback.