My very small related story is in '89 I was in Dallas and got a contracting gig from Aldus to work on Persuasion (Aldus' competitor to PowerPoint) for the Mac. I showed up for my first day, but the guy I was supposed to work for wasn't there yet so the office manager got me a desk and a notepad and IT came and made sure the Mac on my desk was properly connected to the network. After an hour or two of twiddling my thumbs and trying to look like I was doing something productive, my boss came in to say "oh. looks like a lot of us were laid off today and we're canceling your contract."
The Aldus guys were reasonable about it and gave me 2 weeks severance just for holding down the chair for two hours.
It has to be the shortest professional gig I've ever had.
Have you checked out Dave's Garage? [0] He was a Microsoft engineer dating all the way back to the MS DOS days, and he has plenty of stories like this.
Dave had like three or four good stories but then realized it was easier to farm clicks by thumping his credentials while making absolutely trite content
Going from "I invented Task Manager and got Microsoft to send me the XP era source code"
To
"M1 VERSUS RASPBERRY PI DRAAAAAG RACE WHICH IS FASTER?"
I've enjoyed his series on the KIM-1, something that he wasn't personally involved with but is interesting nevertheless.
As for the trite content, only he knows the motivation behind that. I agree that thumping his credentials does take away from what would, in some cases, be interesting topics. Heck, someone with the right background could probably make that Pi/M1 "drag race" interesting (i.e. deep enough to contrast the architecture of the processors, rather than presenting numbers with a faux sportscaster voice).
Persuasion was better than Powerpoint in every way; but even when Adobe bought it from Aldus, it could not compete with "free" i.e. PP being part of Office, and did not last long in the 90's. Office also basically killed word processing innovation and spreadsheet innovation for a long time.
Today almost no one remembers any of these types of apps that existed before Office. I remember since I was involved in several of them.
Unsurprisingly, the one company still having a separate vision in the office application space is Apple. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are opinionated and very different from Office and the also-ran. The simple idea that your buttons for a Pages document are on the right side and scroll down is a genius use of space, yet Word et al. insist on the crappy top drawers of nonsense.
Since then Apple switched from having a seperate inspector window for the controls to having a sidebar. I see this as a downgrade, but a minor one.
And MS kind of went for the same idea but laid out the blocks horizontally. Which… since text is wider than it is tall, makes labels hard to fit in.
And because people don’t scroll horizontally, they made the available options change based on the window width. So if you want to see everything, you’ll make the window fairly wide, at which point you’ve got the ribbon using up vertical real estate, and blank space on the sides where a side-bar or inspector could’ve been.
Microsoft's ribbon UI is such a cluttered mess of a design paradigm. Who knows, maybe once you've memorized it, it's efficient. But for the amount I use the Office apps, nothing is ever where I'd expect it to be. And the layout is just insane, there's differently shaped buttons and groupings of functionality, etc. It's like they just came up with a bunch of icons for the different functionality and haphazardly dumped them all over in random tabs.
This. I only really started using Office about a year ago (after decades of being off Windows)… and… what a mess. I remember the ribbon being touted as “the next big thing” in UI design when it came out but I just don’t see how that makes any sense.
Pages, Numbers, and Keynote were all Steve Jobs being pissy about Microsoft Office.
We have given Keynote the colloquial name "iPreach" for a reason ...
I used to use it, but Pages forced an update and clobbered a final I had made right before I needed to print it out. That was the start of my leaving the Apple ecosystem.
It’s not Steve being “pissy” or really caring about the MS apps at all. Such attitudes, people.
Pages and Numbers exist because Apple wanted a modern office-lite suite to cheaply bundle in place of the increasingly ancient AppleWorks for users who needed basic functionality.
Keynote exists because Steve personally preferred to use a particular NeXT app for presentations — I don’t recall the name —- and it was no longer available. It’s bespoke presentation software originally built directly to Steve’s specifications.
Microsoft has a straight up monopoly on Corporate Domains/Operating Systems. Interesting to me that people complain about Amazon/AWS but noone mentions Microsoft being a huge behemoth. Domains..365 Suite..AD etc;
FAANG was never about tech dominance (no Cisco, no Oracle, no Microsoft) but was about tech stocks experiencing a period of hyper growth at the time the acronym was coined. MS has been a mature, late stage dominant tech firm for decade.
On that part, I never understood why people put Netflix in there, except for making it easier to pronounce. Netflix feels neither like a sheer evil corporation nor an abusive quasi monopoly, nor a giant in any specific way (why would we put Netflix in front of Disney for instance?)
> Overall, it is through strong financial performance such as this that the FAANG stocks have prospered recently. Over the past five years, for instance, Meta and Amazon have seen stock-price increases of 185% and 500%, respectively. For their part, Apple and Alphabet saw price increases of about 175% over that same timeframe, whereas Netflix saw its value rise by nearly 450%.
Others also recognized this (Borland / WordPerfect aligning, and WordPerfect’s strategy was “we interact with other industry leading applications” (like 1-2-3) way before the days of Windows) but they failed to execute for other reasons, so it wasn’t like Microsoft figured out something else others didn’t. They used their first mover advantage and control of the platform to outmaneuver the competition.
WordPerfect couldn't even work well with itself and bungled the transition from DOS to GUI hard. Word's biggest advantage was that it worked great on Windows, while WordPerfect had to tiptoe around offending their existing DOS experts.
History repeats itself in office suites (or at least rhymes) - the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful.
One of the problems was that most companies where developing OS/2 version of their apps, as Microsoft had promised that was the future, while Microsoft was building Windows apps. By the time they realized their mistake, it was already too late.
I still remember how many minutes it took to boot WordPerfect on the schools 486DX2 66Mhz ... I could time it to play a round of doom on another machine next to it.
I'm guessing that was loading over the LAN, as that's the only time I recall seeing multi-minute load times on a DX2. In that scenario, the speed of the computer was largely irrelevant, as files were being pulled from a NetWare server (reading files of very slow spinning disks) over a 10Mb shared media ethernet network.
> the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful
To be fair, the real "competition" that the Ribbon displaced wasn't just menus, it was toolbars. Yes, the toolbar sections were arbitrary, but so were ribbon sections. Massive amounts of cheese moved, causing lots of confusion, and it also took way more screen real-estate. In Office, it was a net loss IMO.
In the File Explorer, the ribbon was a disaster, in practice if not necessarily in theory.
I wasn't offended by the switch, but it definitely felt like an unforced error.
I am a slow typist, and I found that I could get ahead of WordPerfect 6 on Windows 95. Truly good typists must have found this to be a problem. I'm not sure how otherwise the 5.1 diehards were offended, though.
The only thing they gave away for free was a PowerPoint viewer software. Same with Word and Excel.
These are multi-billion dollar product lines, why would MS ever give them away for free? If you received it without paying, you likely bought a PC with Office bundled in. Somebody paid for it one way or another.
Mobile is a different business model, as people are used to paying nothing or very little for apps. It's similar to what used to be called "shareware" or 'trialware' back in the day -- apps with a restricted set of features, designed to entice you into buying the full thing.
Wait, Microsoft used to bundle Office for free with windows? When did that happen? (I'm pretty unfamiliar with pre-2010 Microsoft so I'm genuinely wondering!)
I vaguely recall that in the Windows 3.11 days there was a cut down version of Office (might have been called something else?) which was either free or at least frequently bundled with new PCs in the same way that Windows was.
I can’t find anything online that discusses this though. Most articles seem to talk about recent versions of Office (last 10 or 15 years) but the version I’m thinking of would have been pre-95.
I seem to remember Works was around £80, office 4.3 was around £400.
In reality whatever you had at work was free as you just brought the floppies home and installed it, which led to a generation of people being brought up on Microsoft products.
There was Microsoft Write ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write ) but Word/Office was NEVER bundled with Windows. I used Microsoft products from MS-DOS 5 to Windows 7, and that never happened.
Likewise (well a slightly earlier version of DOS since that’s what my high school ran on their ring token coax network, plus some (by that time) old college stand alones that you had to run something like ‘park’ to park the HDD head before powering off). In fact I’m pretty sure I’d written some of my course work in Word for DOS too. Feels like a life time ago now.
Anyhow, there definitely was an office suite (lower case O) that was bundled with some PCs. But as another HNer points out it was Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Office.
With Windows, no. But many, many computers were sold with Office bundled in through the 2000s. It's how my family got Office and how I think most consumer-side people did.
I strongly preferred Quattro Pro to Excel. By the late 90s, it ceased to exist in university computer labs, because every new computer came bundled with Office. I had only a mild preference for WordPerfect, but the QP to Excel migration was painful.
> Office also basically killed word processing innovation
This is partially true, but importantly, very much untrue as well. Word itself was a massive innovation over the dominant word processing program at the time, WordPerfect. DOS-based, no GUI, obscure commands and yet so widely used that virtually every keyboard came with a WP cheat sheet for the function keys (4 commands per key).
Lotus held their own for a while and forced some innovation in the spreadsheet market. Outside of spreadsheets, the bundling of Word, Powerpoint, and Access was too dominant on Windows -- especially since the previously dominant tools were mainly running on DOS (e.g. WordPerfect).
Huh I always assumed Apple had acquired Concurrence but reality turns out to be far more interesting - the developers were acquired by Sun of all people to develop an OpenStep and then Java office suite...
Even funnier, when Sun showed Looking Glass desktop demo, Jobs apparently called Schwartz with a Cease & Desist demand. Schwartz reportedly answered with equivalent of "nice presentation program you have there, would be a shame if it was canceled for copyright infringement" and the C&D was dropped.
I consulted at Apple for a while, and many people there preferred to use PowerPoint. I was given permission to work with PowerPoint to prevent issues when working with other teams and vendors who did not have keynote.
I found the whole thing hilarious.
Their excel competitor, the name of which i don't recall, had even less utilization internally which i found even more amusing.
Probably depends on the specific team, but I’ve never seen anyone at Apple use anything but Keynote since shortly after it became available. Apple is very sensitive to design, and Keynote’s default templates provide good design out of the box.
Considering that the first releases were cloning an existing program to the point that threat of copyright infringement suit was seen as legitimate, I suspect certain things were forbidden to change at least so long as Jobs lived.
I always said I would miss keynote the most when dropping Mac. I still miss a bit of the ease which with you could create beautiful slides given a decent master.
Not sure why, this was and probably still is a bit better on Mac. But other than that I miss nothing using PowerPoint on Windows nowadays.
I agree. I think Keynote's limitations are a solid feature. Presentations should be basic slides with a minimal amount of important information on them. PowerPoints features are excessive and I've seen those features lead to disastrous, in my opinion, presentation experiences.
Keynote is more limited than Powerpoint; but unless you're a Powerpoint wizard, Keynote has much better defaults and styles. I've yet to see a Keynote deck that cannot be replicated in Powerpoint; but the average user seems to make better ones in Keynote unless they have a designed template that they stick to very carefully.
> I've yet to see a Keynote deck that cannot be replicated in Powerpoint;
Almost every deck I've ever made in Keynote cannot be replicated in PowerPoint. It doesn't have the same support for transitions that Keynote does. Good transitions (not flashy ones) are what make a good presentation great.
Nah mate, I disagree. Good content delivered by a good presenter (or should that be great content and a great presenter) make a great presentation. The slide transitions are eminently forgettable.
Consider perhaps the most famous presentation of them all - the iPhone release - I don't think the slide transitions got too much press, and I don't personally recall what they were.
These days my slide transitions are simple - slide 1 replaced instantly with slide 2. In other words no transition at all.
You may prefer a different transition, but to say it's the transitions that make the presentation great is reaching imo.
The transitions never get press or notice, unless they are bad. Then you get comments about how it looked "unprofessional". Apple keynotes are a great example -- they will never have a slide without a transition of some sort (the instant replace that you mention).
I get paid to make presentations, I've worked with other paid speakers, and I've seen 1000s of presentations. All the people who get paid to make presentations use transitions (and almost all of them use Keynote too), and there is a reason. Because it just looks "unprofessional" when you don't.
This book really upped my presentation game, and using transitions is in it with more explanation, if you're really interested:
I mean of course it does, but if you have a great speaker with great content and a crappy deck, it really takes away from the message. But if you have a good speaker with good content and an amazing deck, it enhances the message so much that that presentation is perceived very highly.
Yes, you need good content and a good speaker as a baseline, but assuming you have that, the deck is what makes the difference.
PowerPoint has been iterated over the years to be more or less a document publishing app that happens to go full-screen. It has support for lots of embeddings (like Excel), and can help turn especially heavy chunks of text into something slightly more digestible – Smart Art is good at this, in fact.
Conversely, Keynote was and remains an app designed for visually heavy presentations, so it optimises a lot more for aesthetics: gradients, blends, transparency, (sadly still no blur wtf), animation of items on a slide, very complex animated reveal and build, complicated slide transitions, etc. It has also UX optimised for visually precise layout (in areas PowerPoint is frankly unhelpful).
If you just want to make people look at pages after page of charts and graphs that should have been memos, PowerPoint is good and possibly stronger. If you want to make an aesthetically compelling visual presentation, Keynote will get you there for less effort.
I'm an Apple user and a PC user at work. Keynote is a toy that works well as long as your use case is hyper-practiced presentations with timed transitions and animations like Steve Jobs would do. Or, pretty pitch decks with made up numbers for VCs to marvel at.
In the real world, where PPTs are created and shared for presenting information and making decisions, we need good integration of real data. PPT does that by linking directly to the source file. If you have an Excel chart that you copied over to PPT, updating the numbers in Excel will update the PPT chart in real time as well. This was a gamechanging feature that saved a lot of time, and I think it only became available with PowerPoint 2007.
The embedding features date from Windows 3.x era, and I think fully came to be with Office 97 or 2000, either of which was implemented fully as set of COM objects with OLE Automation interfaces and essentially embeddable in everything - if you deliver an application on Windows and can specify Office license in your requirements, suddenly you can do a lot more - for example, I've used programs that simply embedded Excel for data entry features, not just as "can import from specially prepared Excel sheets" but directly embedded Excel sheet editor in their GUI and stored Excel data streams internally to their document formats.
Personal opinion. The animations are smoother and better designed, the templates are nicer, the UI is simpler, the default fonts they ship with are more recognizable and render better (at least on hi-res displays), and it feels a little easier on CPU and Memory.
Its simpler and easier to use. Maybe my usecase isnt very heavy but I have not come across anything in Powerpoint that I couldnt do just as well in Keynote.
Also it exports to video. Which I think Powerpoint doesn’t do? (Older version at least)
Keynote has great transitions and appearance the interface for the iWork suite is pretty intuitive and easy to use.
Steve Jobs presentations always made use of it.
But I gotta admit PowerPoint has come a long way and has a ton of great features these days too. Eg it can actually.l design slides for you, quite tastefully on the new 365 version.
Keynote was made so that Steve Jobs could switch to making presentations on Mac instead of PC running late version of OpenSTEP, and faithfully replicated Concurrence which Jobs used on OpenSTEP.
Probably the fact it isn't PowerPoint. When you use PP you use it will preconceived notions that it's a piece of junk that gets in your face. It is and it does.
No doubt. I wonder how long it would have taken though.
As a Macintosh fan since 1985 (when I first got my hands on one) I am always curious at the types of apps that began first on the Macintosh. That PowerPoint began on the Mac was not something that I previously knew about but when I saw the Mac screenshot in the article it all became clear to me somehow.
People of course take issue with this, but I feel the early Mac interface and Mac-native apps encouraged a kind of creative way of thinking and so brought about even more creative apps to the platform.
As a contrapositive (?): I dislike the user interface for Adobe Reader (Acrobat) on the Mac, very un-Mac-like. I was told by someone on the team that this was deliberate — trying to fit in with Microsoft's stable of "office apps".
Maybe that's more of a discussion of whether an app should conform to the UI of a platform or the UI of a popular "suite".
Word for DOS (and Xenix!) predates Mac Word, and even the Macintosh itself, but Word for Mac predates Word for Windows by several years.
The DOS predecessor to Excel was Multiplan, which again predates the Mac, but Excel 1.0 was indeed a Mac-only product; Excel 2.0 was the first cross-platform version.
Another interesting example is Halo, which was originally planned as a Mac exclusive and introduced as such by none other than Steve Jobs during a Macworld keynote. Then Microsoft acquired Bungie while building up a stable of exclusive launch titles for the original Xbox, and it didn't see a Mac release until after the Windows version shipped a couple years later.
Halo was never going to be Mac exclusive. It was going to be Mac/Windows like Bungie's other recent stuff at the time like Myth II. It was introduced at Macworld but it was always intended to have a Windows version.
No, I totally prefer Preview. (I worked on Preview for many years though.)
Besides the odd PDF that CoreGraphics/PDFKit can't handle, I like that Reader gives me "booklet printing" in page setup so that I can print 2-up with the correct page ordering to get a (5 ½ x 8 ½, U.S.) folded book in the end.
For those who don't want to click through for the video, macOS has booklet printing system-wide (in anything that uses the standard Print dialog); it's one of the options for two-sided printing in the Layout section of the print dialog.
I recall it being printer-specific also. Dell laser would do it, Brother (?) wouldn't. There was even an app (Booklet Maker?) for n-up challenged printers.
I imagine it's a printer-implemented feature, like duplex, with a very high-level option flag. A Postscript printer with a full-page RIP buffer could probably do it pretty easily if it wasn't extremely resource constrained. A RIP that did banding internally, re-compositing the PS source several times (are there [still] such things?) would have a hard time. A bitmapped printer (the cheap all-in-ones) would need to hold the entire page in memory on the Mac. Back in the day (way, way back), at least, drivers would process in bands, and the apps were required to re-draw the relevant parts of the page for each band. There wasn't any provision in the API to work on multiple pages at once. I don't know if application-level banding is still a thing, but could see echoes of incompatibility remaining.
Edit: n-up implemented in the OS can be tricky for Postscript printers. It requires nesting pages inside pages. Ill-mannered, but legal, Postscript can cause issues. It might be better with newer versions of PS, but the OS would still need to support older printers with old versions.
I used that for a few years outputting slides to transparencies on a pen plotter. There was some other pre-Powerpoint program I used on PCs back then too but don't remember the name--may have been Lotus Freelance. (And a minicomputer-based program before those.)
Those were the days when you had all manner of different word processing and graphics programs (among other things--though Lotus had mostly standardized people on 1-2-3 before Excel and Microsoft Office came along).
It's been decades since I heard of Harvard Graphics. Was part of my toolkit with WordStar, Lotus 123, FoxPro and NC. MS C6.0, MASM, CodeWarrior, an editor called Brief on the dev side. Good times.
I remember getting a giant box copy of it when a company my dad worked for was shutting down, it was years after it had been released but it had a massive manual and was pretty powerful.
Not sure if Powerpoint was the standard in my circles - hearing a talk being called a Keynote was definitely more common, but maybe this is just a tech/science bias.
In French corporate circles for 25 years, I have only seen presentations with Powerpoint or the occasional full-screen PDF. Apple is common among freelancers, but company people get the obligatory Windows laptop.
If you really want to read more than you ever wanted to know about the history of powerpoint, Robert Gaskins - one of the creators - wrote a whole book of the history [0] and has a detailed web site with tons more details [1].
It’s pretty good. Could it have been 100 pages shorter? Sure. But it’s rare you get a seminal software project’s history and design decisions documented so well by one of its key creators. We turned some of they key points from the book into a podcast episode:
A world where Apple had acquired PowerPoint in 1987 could have hurt Apple's own HyperCard, which was also released in 1987. HyperCard did have its moment of success from its release in 1987 to roughly the mid-1990s.
Back on our timeline where Microsoft acquired PowerPoint, HyperCard could have been a strong competitor to PowerPoint well into the 2000s had (1) Apple gave HyperCard's development more love, (2) Apple authorized a port to Windows during the Windows 3.1 era, and (3) Apple developed functionality to convert HyperCard stacks to Web applications and released this around 1995 or 1996.
I feel PowerPoint + Microsoft had to legitimize presentation software as a standard business piece of software first though. Maybe Hypercard was too early in that regard then.
Hypercard was very much a presentation software. It had the best animations at the time, compared to Powerpoint. And it supported features that seem obvious once you hear about them: from any slide (card), you could click on an element of the slide, and it would take you to another slide about that element. Powerpoint is still mostly focused on linear "next slide" all the time.
In other words, with Powerpoint, you are presenting to a passive audience. With Hypercard, you were handing the control of the presentation to the attendee, and they could drive the presentation wherever they wanted.
It had some functionality in that direction, and you could easily bridge the missing features with HyperTalk scripts. I think the real limitations were the 1-bit graphics and the lack of widespread availability of projection video hardware before the early 90’s.
edit: I just remembered that I’ve seen people give presentations built with HyperCard. I recall one where the presenter pretended to be surprised by a system crash (== displaying a Macsbug screenshot in the middle of the presentation) but neglected to hide the HyperCard hand cursor.
There was a moment when the creators of the presentation and the presenters were able to become one - just like Excel took number fiddling from the dedicated wizards to any manager, so to did Powerpoint take slide decks from the slide wizards to the managers. It took a bit to catch on but once it did it was wildfire.
When I was a scientist, I saw a similar level of degradation in work output for the group from PowerPoint. People would do experiments just to have something to present and talk about in the PowerPoint. I’d lose a whole day of research every time it was my day to present and I had to spend the day before making the PowerPoint. It has pros also, but the cons are severe. Goodhart’s Law rears its head over and over as society goes forward. Your target becomes a full PowerPoint instead of the real measure which is making good science and publishing good papers.
Reading through this, I see the problems have nothing to do with Powerpoint, and everything to do with organizational inefficiencies. Powerpoint is the scapegoat.
> America's military staff spend their time making, giving, and listening to PowerPoint presentations instead of, you know, preparing for war.
That is a presentation to the outside. Internally, PowerPoint gets almost zero use. Everything is document+appendix based. There are exceptions for things like org level meetings and announcements that are more of a broadcast medium but anything that is collaborative or at a smaller scale is done through a rather ridged standard document format.
Overall, there isn't a ban on use but it has a very limited use compared to many other companies.
Sales != Engineering. I occasionally built a PowerPoint if it was useful to. But the standard was information was conveyed in a written narrative. A PowerPoint is something you use when you’re talking in front of a large audience to have something happen every now and then to make your talking less boring. For a discussion you write a story. At least that’s how I did Amazon.
Business lore is full of ridiculous apocryphal tales journalists absolutely love running with because they make CEOs seem 'quirky' and 'outside-the-box'.
I remember one from the "The Everything Store" book where Bezos both insisted on his lieutenants writing memos to 'clarify thinking', while personally responding to emails by forwarding it to someone else with a "?" and nothing more.
> Key personnel, to be named (but certainly including all the senior developers and me), would be required to agree to relocate to Redmond as a condition of the deal.
That's horrible. I've moved quite a few times for my spouse, and the last one was extremely painful. (I made her promise that it was the last time she asks to move for career reasons.)
Many of us are in two-career relationships. We have children and families. Casually expecting that we can move on the drop of a hat is short-sighted, and a good way to make an acquisition fail.
1. The acquisition was in 1987. To put that into context, that's before the WWW even existed (1993) or people even having corporate email. Working remote wasn't even possible at that time because everything was done in-person and/or on paper. As such, it was commonplace for acquisitions to be migrated back to HQ (this also explains why so many older companies have such big corp HQs because there was a date and time when everyone worked at that location).
2. "Key personnel" typically means founder and executive staff. It's totally reasonable for an acquirer to want the key people to stay engaged and get fully integrated (because why else acquire the company). And because of #1, it was common place to ask for this relocation. Keep in mind, they didn't have to accept the buyout offer but they did.
Interestingly enough, in IT remote work started pretty early - first you had various homegrown setups at companies and universities (BBN, Project MAC at MIT, etc), and IBM starting a telecommute option in 1979 with 5 employees, and having over 2000 employees working remotely by 1983.
Hindsight is 20-20; but I suspect that they anticipated that a Microsoft acquisition would give them a much better career, and product longevity, than the other buyers.
Example: I was a lead for Syncplicity's desktop client. Many of the pieces of our product were better than the initial versions of OneDrive. Yet, the reality was that most of our customers used us to edit Office documents. Today, Office integrates with OneDrive much better than we could. (Microsoft made changes in Windows and Office to support OneDrive, we would have needed a much larger team in order to do the same.)
In the case of Powerpoint, it plays a lot more nicely with other Office products, (and also plays nicely with OneDrive.) That wouldn't have happened if someone else bought it. Most likely, because Microsoft had so much money, they could have made their own presentation package that was "good enough" and eventually market forces would favor it due to the smoothness of their product line.
Obviously, for me, it would have worked out better if Microsoft bought us and turned us into OneDrive! It would have also worked out better for me if Google bought us and turned us into the Desktop portion of Google Drive!
I was just thinking about Syncplicity this morning, and found your comment. What a trip! Looking back, it feels like a completely different world. Hope you're well.
You're right about MSFT's long-term platform advantage. File sync is intimately related to filesystem internals, and NTFS is their walled garden - just the same as Office. We bet way harder on Google Docs but kind of missed the point there.
- Ansa (to merge for an IPO in the fall, to be done by Alex. Brown at a $75 million value)
- a “firm” offer from Borland to acquire Forethought for $18 million in cash, with action absolutely guaranteed within the week (never happened)
- an immensely complex offer from Xerox (after hours of negotiations) for exclusive sales rights to PowerPoint, for which they would pay something above $18 million
So, that’s “no offer”, an offer to merge at some later time with another company, a non existent option to sell the entire company for about what Microsoft offered for PowerPoint alone, and one offer to sell the sales rights.
It seems Xerox was the only real alternative. Reading between the lines, that would have cost quite a bit more in legal fees than Microsoft’s offer, and would mean Forethought would have to keep paying for development of the product (in exchange for a part of the revenues)
An offer is only as good as the buyer’s trustworthiness. It seems like they trusted Microsoft the most to close quickly and cleanly. The quotes around “firm” for Borland’s offer and description of laborious dealing with Xerox make it seem like the buyers thought $4M more was not worth the headache.
> a “firm” offer from Borland to acquire Forethought for $18 million in cash, with action absolutely guaranteed within the week (never happened), and an immensely complex offer from Xerox (after hours of negotiations) for exclusive sales rights to PowerPoint, for which they would pay something above $18 million. The meeting ended with a summary of the agreed directions to management: “Our real agenda is to get a clean, high offer from Microsoft.”
I think the team was most interested in the MS offer. It also looks like it was the most solid. And I guess it provided an acceptable return to the investors.
It’s hard or impossible to get a deal done if the team isn’t on board. That’s why, for example, when a company is in trouble or especially bankrupt, you’ll see big carve outs and/or cash payments to the management team (otherwise they’ll just jump ship and the investors get nothing). So pursuing, say, Apple, would just stretch things out and allow MS to go find an alternative.
Back then and still today there were multiple objectives to an exit for the Valley VC firms. Yes, they wanted a good return for themselves and their LPs and that was and is primary. But they also wanted good “brand” exits for marketing (both to LPs and startups). Finally, they want a good reputation with the staff which might help get more opportunities down the road.
There are so many more players in VC these days that the dynamic isn’t quite the same, but in my experience the big Valley investors play the long game more than east coast ones. And in Europe, apart from Hermann Hauser, I never really have seen the long game at all.
The HN title has gone through quite a few iterations by now.
- Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
- How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
- Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (1987)
- Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
I would prefer "How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)" to make it clear that this is both a story about a past event, and this story was told some years ago.
Usually, a year in parentheses on a HN post indicates the publiction date of the article--specifically when the article isn't current--not the dates of the events recounted. In this case the article is from 2016 as the date suggests.
> There is a lot of convoluted bit shifting that occurs in order to get the address and data from a Game Genie. This is probably to make the Game Genie codes seem more magical. After all, given 2 Game Genie codes, one that granted 5 lives on startup and another code that granted 9 lives, and the only difference between the 2 codes was one character, even a novice player could probably figure out that modifying that one character to any of the acceptable letter characters would grant between 1 and 16 lives on startup.
Why would they want to intentionally obfuscate it though? Doesn't it just add more value to their product if people are able to reverse-engineer codes and come up with better stuff?
Or maybe the real reason to randomize things more is because it creates more potential for diversity in the effects of codes? e.g. instead of a code that gives you 5 lives and a one-character-different code that gives you 9 lives, by randomizing things the first code gives you 5 lives and the second code makes you fly
I was curious what PowerPoint looked like in 1987 and found this video of someone exploring a sample presentation that came with it: https://vimeo.com/181999729
Thanks, that was interesting to see. For what was probably tens of kilobytes in size, and seeing the sample presentation with images, charts, bullet points etc, as well as some of the options in the menus, I have to say it doesn't seem that much limited when it comes to essential functionality, compared to the current 1GB version :)
Keynote was one of the eye-opening moments for me when switching from Win to Mac, and one of the big reasons I am committed to staying in Apple’s ecosystem.
This sounds like a stereotype, but I use Beamer whenever I can.
Otherwise: I don't use Emacs (I actually do Beamer in Overleaf, the easy-o online latex editor), can write regexes but don't have a clue of what awk does, use Notion and the Google calendar thing instead of text tools and write my todo.txt in pen in my wrist (or did when I worked in an office and could conceal it with business button-down shirts).
Excel was the product that really overwhelmed the competition--including Lotus 1-2-3--when the world transitioned to Windows. Word and Powerpoint were decent programs but there were plenty of competitive options out there. But getting Powerpoint and Word for "free" as part of a Microsoft bundle pretty much sealed the deal. (And arguably pretty much froze office suites in amber.)
I doubt it. By 1987, Office was already well on its way to its dominant position, and whatever presentation tool Microsoft bought would have become the de facto presentation tool, be it PowerPoint, Keynote, or some other tool that's been forgotten, simply because it was available in a package the business was already buying.
They already had Hypercard, and did nothing to make it mainstream, leaving it entirely to artists and creative people. HC was miles ahead of PowerPoint, it had a scripting language under the hood that people used to develop games, early offline websites, and even inventory management and small business invoicing systems.
The article is interesting in the part of buying PowerPoint.
But what happened with the other "big" product mentioned briefly in the article: "FileMaker Plus"? Does that mean that some people stayed with the "old" company and then got later acquired by Apple? Because AFAIK, FileMaker these days is a subsidiary of Apple.
Forethought was the distributor of FileMaker and not the developer. After Microsoft acquired Forethought the developer, Nashoba, directly distributed FileMaker. Eventually Nashoba was purchased by Claris which was a division of Apple. Claris was later renamed to FileMaker.
My very small related story is in '89 I was in Dallas and got a contracting gig from Aldus to work on Persuasion (Aldus' competitor to PowerPoint) for the Mac. I showed up for my first day, but the guy I was supposed to work for wasn't there yet so the office manager got me a desk and a notepad and IT came and made sure the Mac on my desk was properly connected to the network. After an hour or two of twiddling my thumbs and trying to look like I was doing something productive, my boss came in to say "oh. looks like a lot of us were laid off today and we're canceling your contract."
The Aldus guys were reasonable about it and gave me 2 weeks severance just for holding down the chair for two hours.
It has to be the shortest professional gig I've ever had.