[HN Gopher] Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
Author : jasim
Score : 235 points
Date : 2022-06-28 09:18 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.zamzar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.zamzar.com)
| indigodaddy wrote:
| I would imagine they now wished they had taken the MSFT stock...
| tecleandor wrote:
| Oh yeah. True, hindsight is 20/20 (same as with crypto assets)
| but that'd be more than 7 billion today...
| asddubs wrote:
| The article year is kind of confusing on this one, it made me go
| "that can't be right, Microsoft owned PowerPoint before then...
| didn't it?"
| abruzzi wrote:
| 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.
| asddubs wrote:
| yup, I actually know about that, but it still made me do a
| double-take
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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.
| salgernon wrote:
| It's weird how Apple is part of the title when they're barely
| mentioned.
| pauliephonic wrote:
| If Apple had succeeded in buying Powerpoint, whatever alternative
| Microsoft purchased (or made) would have become the de facto
| standard anyway.
| outside1234 wrote:
| They would have just built it. It is not like Powerpoint or the
| rest was magic, they just wanted to accelerate their timeline.
| mc32 wrote:
| Harvard Graphics!
| astatine wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Wow, Harvard Graphics apparently stuck around until _2017_
| - http://www.harvardgraphics.com
|
| 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.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| That software understood the difference between data and
| presentation.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Mirage was one too. It was hard to use.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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).
| duxup wrote:
| And who knows what Apple maybe would do with Powerpoint. We've
| seen products purchased used and quickly discarded too at
| times.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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".
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| What does Reader give you that Preview doesn't?
|
| I think Excel and Word were originally Mac products.
| jasomill wrote:
| 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.
| goosedragons wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Kid Pix, Sim City, Myst and Photoshop also come to mind.
|
| Was there anything like the After Dark screensaver on
| Windows before it exploded on the Mac scene?
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I remember the Halo demo in the keynote.
|
| I've also had a product I worked on in a keynote by Jobs.
| A nervous time.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| 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 1/2 x 8 1/2, U.S.) folded book in the
| end.
|
| I like nothing else about Reader.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| Ah ok. Some basic pagination features then.
|
| You might take a look at this:
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RpNFa6_OiY
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Holy hell, when did they add the Booklet option to Page
| Setup?
|
| EDIT: Wait, I don't see that in Preview, MacOS Monterey.
| I wonder if it is a feature of the printer driver (tried
| both my Brother and HP, no go).
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I'd be surprised if it was a printer only thing. The 2up
| would be a software thing typically.
|
| I used to work on Agfa's RIP back in the day.
| mgsouth wrote:
| 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.
| JonathonW wrote:
| 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.
| yitianjian wrote:
| 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.
| liotier wrote:
| 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.
| mtmail wrote:
| A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynote is a type of public
| speech, especially at conference. That's unrelated to
| presentation tools in this case.
| yitianjian wrote:
| Today I learned, nice
| [deleted]
| conductr wrote:
| > unrelated to presentation tools in this case.
|
| Not entirely
|
| https://www.apple.com/keynote/
| tssva wrote:
| Keynote the app was named after the term keynote referring to
| a speech not the other way around.
| yeaso9 wrote:
| gigatexal wrote:
| Good. Had they bought PowerPoint and then became successful
| they'd get big, rich, and lazy. And we'd never have gotten the
| iMac or later the iPhone.
| Grustaf wrote:
| More importantly, we wouldn't have Keynote and we'd be stuck
| using Powerpoint
| tbihl wrote:
| PowerPoint is not, and never had been, the crown jewel of
| Office, which is Excel.
| fortran77 wrote:
| I still use Excel all the time. Most of my work is digital
| signal processing, and I use the Complex number features in
| Excel for analysis.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.)
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| 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.
| PopAlongKid wrote:
| Is "1987" a typo?
|
| " _[Office] was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1,
| 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas._ "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office
| ascagnel_ wrote:
| Ah, I got my timelines mixed up. I thought Office was
| already out by 1987; 1987 was when Microsoft acquired
| PowerPoint for Office.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| re wrote:
| 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
| alluro2 wrote:
| 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 :)
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| 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.
| dingosity wrote:
| I love these first hand accounts from the 80s.
|
| 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.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Much better return on labor than what the Tesla people got.
| ahmed_ds wrote:
| > I love these first hand accounts from the 80s.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/c/DavesGarage
| IntelMiner wrote:
| 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?"
| II2II wrote:
| 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).
| r12343a_19 wrote:
| Often... people also have personal and professional
| interests.
|
| They do not provide uni-dimensional entertainment for ages.
| linguae wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| That's interesting -- Hypercard as preso software.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| alain94040 wrote:
| 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.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Hypercard just needed templates.
| sk8terboi wrote:
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| It's not for those times. Two things:
|
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The article was very clear that "Key personnel ... including
| all the senior developers and me"
| p_l wrote:
| 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.
| iakh wrote:
| What was the reasoning for pursuing a 14m offer from Microsoft
| over multiple others at 18m?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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."
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| 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!
| pianoben wrote:
| 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.
| Someone wrote:
| Reading the article, the alternatives were
|
| - Apple (no offer finalized)
|
| - 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)
|
| I can see why they went for the simpler option.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Somewhat related: Matt Levine yesterday on the offers for
| Spirit
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-28/don-t-...
| s1mon wrote:
| 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].
|
| [0] https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-
| bu...
|
| [1] https://www.robertgaskins.com
| A_Venom_Roll wrote:
| Over 500 pages is a bit daunting, is it a worthwhile read?
| cruano wrote:
| Are you asking for a PowerPoint presentation ?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| 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:
|
| https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/c2d1ba5d/powerpoint
| janandonly wrote:
| And the book can be downloaded from his website, for free.
|
| Check: https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-
| history/sweating-bu...
| april_22 wrote:
| Might be a different.. but interesting read. Thank you.
| pluc wrote:
| Can we update the title to reflect that this is a 2016 story
| about a 1987 event
| willbw wrote:
| One could probably infer that no?
| pluc wrote:
| "How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M" would
| be more accurate, and it's the actual headline. Without the
| "How" it looks like news.
| jasim wrote:
| The "How" was stripped by HN from the title. Edited and
| fixed it.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| No, it's customary to add [2016] to links to old articles to
| make clear that it is not news.
| willbw wrote:
| Fair enough, I was referring to the fact that Microsoft
| buying PowerPoint didn't happen recently. But that wasn't
| clear from my comment.
| hbn wrote:
| > 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
|
| Assuming I'm understanding things correctly
| PinguTS wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| 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.
| PinguTS wrote:
| Thanks. Yeah, remember working with Claris Filemaker on MacOS
| 9. But didn't knew that Forethought was "just" a distributor
| to this product.
|
| Thanks for clearing this up.
| coldcode wrote:
| 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.
| outside1234 wrote:
| Persuasion (and the rest) was not better in the business sense.
|
| ie. As a CIO, I can go buy a suite of products that work
| together well. This is what Microsoft recognized - the bundle
| and integration was the key.
| pooper wrote:
| Maybe this is obvious but this sound like zoom vs Microsoft
| teams story just in the past.
| marricks wrote:
| And giving them away for free with an operating system to
| kill any competition that could exist?
|
| It's impossible to compete without making a whole different
| operating system when Microsoft was in it's anticompetitive
| heyday.
|
| Even through the lease of how our world is meant to work
| that's seems messed up.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| criddell wrote:
| I think they are free on iOS and Android.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > And giving them away for free with an operating system to
| kill any competition that could exist?
|
| Microsoft never did this, but Apple did. And still does
| today.
| cupofpython wrote:
| reminds me of trying to compete with imessage or facetime
| today
| mardifoufs wrote:
| 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!)
| yabatopia wrote:
| That never happened.
| emsixteen wrote:
| I don't remember them doing it at least. Maybe before the
| '97 versions?
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
| xtracto wrote:
| 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.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works
|
| (After reading the above link, Im surprised to see Works
| lasted so long. The last time I ever saw it "in the wild"
| was back on Windows 3.11)
| xtracto wrote:
| I remember having a hard time looking to open .WKS files
| from some accountants here in my country who refused to
| stop using Works for a long time.
| Lammy wrote:
| It's sneaky how Works muddied the water for Lotus 1-2-3
| which already used `.wks` for its WorKSheet files:
| http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Lotus_1-2-3
| jcheng wrote:
| You might be thinking of Microsoft Works? I don't
| remember it being free but it was frequently offered as a
| low-cost add-on.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Ahh yes, that's exactly what I'm thinking of. Thanks for
| the reminder.
| mod50ack wrote:
| 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.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| 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.
| Arainach wrote:
| 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.
| pianoben wrote:
| > 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.
| mgoetzke wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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.
| kwanbix wrote:
| 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.
| sleepdreamy wrote:
| 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;
| tmccrary55 wrote:
| You must be new to the industry
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I did a genuine double take there. 'No one complains about
| Microsoft being a behemoth'. Erm....what?
| tiahura wrote:
| There's no M in FAAnG.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| I've always thought it should be faamg anyway!
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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?)
| SgtBastard wrote:
| 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.
| bachmeier wrote:
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| 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.
| systoll wrote:
| I really wish MS had worked on bringin their 2008, pages-
| inspired mac UI to windows rather than bringing the ribbon to
| the Mac.
|
| https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_offic.
| ..
|
| 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.
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| hbn wrote:
| 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.
| nray wrote:
| And Freehand was better than Illustrator IMHO, but Adobe
| bundled Illustrator with Photoshop to schools and so we lost a
| great drawing and layout tool.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| RIP Gimp
| spikej wrote:
| I loved how well the Macromedia products played with each
| other. Freehand -> Flash or Director just WORKED! Illustrator
| to these failed miserably.
| nojito wrote:
| Keynote is vastly better than PowerPoint. Apple made the right
| call in the end.
| duxup wrote:
| Keynote somehow always looks amazing, but is also pretty
| limited compared to power point.
|
| Having said that ... it also gets the same job done so being
| limited maybe isn't so bad.
| innocentoldguy wrote:
| 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.
| sdoering wrote:
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| Every time I dip into PowerPoint it feels so hard to make
| things not ... look bad.
| april_22 wrote:
| Non-Apple user here. Just out of curiosity: what makes
| Keynote better than Powerpoint?
| dr-detroit wrote:
| ch_sm wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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.
| Synaesthesia wrote:
| 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.
| ska wrote:
| > quite tastefully on the new 365 version.
|
| This is definitely a YMMV situation.
| p_l wrote:
| 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.
|
| It was made for Jobs' keynotes as its main goal
| bonaldi wrote:
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| 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.
| jedberg wrote:
| > 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.
| mvidal01 wrote:
| Doesn't the content and the public speaking skills of the
| presenter play a role?
| jedberg wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| p_l wrote:
| 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.
| statictype wrote:
| 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)
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| PowerPoint has been able to export to video for ages. You
| can even export to GIF _shudder_
| arbitrary_name wrote:
| 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.
| xattt wrote:
| > Their excel competitor, the name of which i don't recall
| ...
|
| I think they named after whatever spreadsheets are used for
| calculating, something like Apple Digits or Numerals or
| Figures.
|
| Does anyone else remember?
| bdowling wrote:
| It's called Numbers. I prefer it to Libre Office Calc.
| Neither are perfect substitutes for a person who really
| needs Excel though.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Pretty sure xattt was attempting humor.
| bdowling wrote:
| _Whoosh_. Thanks.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Keynote looks great but is essentially unchanged for almost
| 20 years. PowerPoint is less awful in many ways than it was.
| p_l wrote:
| 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.
| PinguTS wrote:
| You know, that there was no Keynote in the 1980 and 1990.
| There was no Keynote before MacOS X at all.
|
| As much as I like Keynote, it is still very limited in many
| ways. One not so unimportant, it is Apple only.
| edf13 wrote:
| I use Keynote on Windows... via the iCloud website. It is
| Keynote, although a little more limited - but it works for
| me.
| kalleboo wrote:
| 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...
| p_l wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| A study in network effects and defacto standards-based
| monopoly.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| ... and destroyed the global productivity gains brought by
| automation for generations.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| Reminded of this story-
|
| https://theweek.com/articles/673091/general-mattis-save-mili...
|
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
| politelemon wrote:
| 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.
|
| This is a horrible, tone deaf take.
|
| > You know who has banned PowerPoint? Amazon
|
| You know what's an incorrect statement? This one.
| Hammershaft wrote:
| Do you have a source for the Amazon statement being false?\
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/jeff-bezos-this-is-the-
| smart...
| jen20 wrote:
| I was in a call with some folks from Amazon (AWS)
| yesterday where they presented via PowerPoint.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| 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.
| jen20 wrote:
| This was an engineering call. I'm not suggesting it's
| used heavily, just that it is not banned, of if it is,
| the ban is not universally respected.
| saratogacx wrote:
| 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.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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.
| taude wrote:
| When I've gone to some of the big AWS events, they were
| definitely using PowerPoint during the presentations.
| thanatropism wrote:
| 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).
|
| But Beamer, oh la la.
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