61–70 of 153 posts
PowerPoint would never have become what it was without being on Windows and part of Office. So no, not really. Ignoring network effects makes this kind of silly. Keynote has also been better for a number of years now. Still not as popular just because Macs are less common than PCs with office.
The deal of the century was when SAIC bought Network Solutions for $4.7M in 1995. Five years later, they sold it to VeriSign for $21B.
A stake worth ~$63 billion today
That's the deal of the century (so far).
Also worth noting, SAIC did not own 100% of Network Solutions when it was bought from the public market by Verisign. SAIC had sold off a massive stake in the company by that point. They basically liquidated 80% of their ownership in Network Solutions for about three billion dollars over several years (at the IPO point, and then multiple secondary offerings). For example, it sold off 38% of Network Solutions for $765 million in February 1999 in a secondary offering, and then another 21% for $1.8 billion later.
Random trivia for tech history buffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forethought,_Inc . under founder Rob Campbell sold PowerPoint to MS and FileMaker to Apple. Of course everyone knows PowerPoint but even most techies today have never touched FileMaker - it was the Django/Rails/WordPress/SquareSpace/RAD application back in the day. At a time when very few could code, FileMaker let anyone create a full-featured databa…
I think it's so ironic that the first version of Powerpoint was for Mac which ended up helping give Windows it's name when running Office. I've seen Powerpoint used for so many crazy things. Most notably non-technical managers designing a UI in Powerpoint. It's just one of those, lets just get the job done pieces of software.
Random trivia for tech history buffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forethought,_Inc . under founder Rob Campbell sold PowerPoint to MS and FileMaker to Apple. Of course everyone knows PowerPoint but even most techies today have never touched FileMaker - it was the Django/Rails/WordPress/SquareSpace/RAD application back in the day. At a time when very few could code, FileMaker let anyone create a full-featured databa…
Access seems way more cheaper and more advanced? and with access you get the whole suit(excel and word).
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Yes. Most people who aren't in the tech just launch a word processor (word, libreoffice, etc.) Tech people on Windows use Notepad or a similar GUI program. Vim is used by a tiny, tiny fraction of people in the world.
> Tech people on Windows use Notepad. I'm always horrified to see this. MS really shot themselves in the foot with the dev community by not providing a powerful text editor as the default. Getting a WinAdmin to enjoy the UNIX'y way of doing things is like trying to feed a child broccoli.
There are a couple of gems (netsh for example), but commandline on Windows is just painful.
Powershell does give you a lot more potential, but I've found its syntax to be too verbose to be a comfortable commandline replacement.
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The first version of Excel was ALSO for Mac. I think the Macintosh doesn't get enough credit for what it inspired at the time.
I believe Halo, one of the Xbox's most popular games, had its first version (first one you could buy, i mean) on Mac
While obviously PowerPoint is ubiquitous and influential, it's interesting - I don't think I've ever used PowerPoint in professional life. The last time I needed to prepare a slide presentation was in high school.
Random trivia for tech history buffs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forethought,_Inc . under founder Rob Campbell sold PowerPoint to MS and FileMaker to Apple. Of course everyone knows PowerPoint but even most techies today have never touched FileMaker - it was the Django/Rails/WordPress/SquareSpace/RAD application back in the day. At a time when very few could code, FileMaker let anyone create a full-featured databa…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The first version of Excel was ALSO for Mac. I think the Macintosh doesn't get enough credit for what it inspired at the time.
Didn't Excel descend from Multiplan which was originally for DOS?