Nisus chief executive strives for success

By: ANDREW PETERSON - For the North County Times | Wednesday, April 26, 2006 7:11 PM PDT ∞

DEL MAR ---- Jerzy Lewak, the 68-year-old chief executive officer of Nisus Inc., has always lived his life against the grain. When this is pointed out to him, he offers a metaphorical shrug.

"I don't try to do that," he says. "What I try to do is solve problems."

Early in his life, the paramount problem confronting his family was one of survival in their native country, war-torn Poland.

"In 1939, the war broke out," he recalled. "And I was deported with my grandparents and my mother to Kazakhstan. Then from Kazakhstan, we escaped to Tehran, Iran."

From there, his family traveled to Tanzania, and then to England, where by age 24 he had earned his doctorate at the University of Manchester. He immigrated to New York in 1964, and came to UC San Diego in 1966, where he ended up in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

By the early 1980s, the personal computer revolution was in full swing, and he was in the middle of it.

"(I used) students to help me write teaching programs for advanced mathematics for engineers," he said. "(The programs) worked very well, and I saw an opportunity to do that for high schools and colleges."

He founded his first company, Paragon Concepts, with his own money. But it soon floundered.

Then fate intervened in the form of a startling new product from Apple Computer: the Macintosh.

"It had all the graphic tools," Lewak said. "It was a very new system, it had windows, it had everything. It had a mouse control. It was the ideal system."

Overnight, he made a bold and risky decision: shift all of his programming energies to the Mac. With this shift in direction came a new name for the company: Nisus ---- meaning "to strive."

Although the Mac came bundled with a revolutionary word processor ---- MacWrite ---- it couldn't handle the scientific and mathematical fonts that Lewak used every day, so he created them from scratch. He also wrote a program to properly handle them: Qed (Quality Editor). By 1989, Qed had developed into a word processor, Nisus Writer, which has survived to this day as one of the few full-featured Mac-based alternatives to that behemoth of the business world, Microsoft Word.

"We had all sorts of people and companies approach us to try and work with us and buy our products to sell as their word processor," Lewak said. "None of them worked out."

The list of spurned suitors includes IBM, Borland and Claris (the latter two no longer exist). Whether one of their deals would have catapulted Del Mar-based Nisus from niche player into the big leagues is forever moot.

But Nisus has unquestionably earned, like Apple, a passionate and devoted following by going its own way.

It is all the more ironic that Apple has not always reciprocated the devotion shown to it by Nisus.

"I think it's like an elephant that doesn't see that they're stepping on an ant," Lewak said wryly.

But it was not always so.

In the early '90s, a bundling deal arranged by Apple in South Korea brought Nisus a tenfold increase in annual sales. But by the time the contract came up for renewal, the winds had shifted in Cupertino, where it was decreed that the latest version of MacWrite would replace Nisus Writer.

"They kicked us out of Korea," Lewak said.

Then Microsoft kicked Apple out of corporate America, and Apple's market share tumbled. Nisus tumbled with it. Their roster of employees shrank from a high of around 30 to a level Lewak acknowledges as "very low" today.

If the resurgence of Apple is the stuff of corporate legend, the perseverance of Lewak's company, in the face of a Mac software market that again bustles with competitors, is surely noteworthy.

Nisus' newest product, a revamped word processor called Writer Express, is under active development and garnering glowing reviews.

"I still try to involve everybody, to have everybody know what's going on, and to be as open as possible. And to be as open as possible to change," said Lewak, who runs Nisus out of his home office. "Because that's the name of the game in technology: change. It's so easy to get into a rut, and find any change objectionable, and that is the death knell."

Contact freelance writer Andrew Peterson at andrew.a.peterson@cox.net.

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