How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M • Hacker News Board

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#101

Post by uxp » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:36 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #66

Spivak wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Also cmd.exe being a steaming pile of shit and the handful of commandline utilities that ship by default are mostly ancient DOS versions from the 80s. 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.

Powershell is an interesting environment.

On one hand, it's almost a C#/CLR REPL with amazing power to program and script almost anything you could think of, but on the other it's not a shell and anyone coming from *nix that tries to think like a shell will be sorely disappointed in how verbose and unintuitive it behaves.

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#102

Post by cdubzzz » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:46 PM UTC

Keyframe wrote: post #98

chime wrote: post #33

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…

90's Apple (the beige phase, hah) users knew about FileMaker. At least in my own little circle. There was even a debate FileMake vs 4D (I was in 4D camp). Weird time to be alive. RAD tools and UML, everything visual basically, seemed to be THE FUTURE. Look at us now.

I forgot all about 4D. At my first real job we had a business management package based on 4D. The website was LAMP and eventually we wanted to offer B2B stuff so I had to build systems to keep 4D and MySQL in sync. Later we purchased and merged with a company using a system with an Oracle backend and for some reason we had to keep the systems separate. So I got to add Oracle in to mix syncing to the website. Fun times.

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#103

Post by derriz » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:47 PM UTC

mikehearn wrote: post #9

martin-adams wrote: post #3

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.

I am unabashedly in support of using presentation software for initial UI design. For basic wireframing, you don't need much more than the ability add shapes, text, color, images + a way to demonstrate user flow (e.g. by ordering slides). Presentation software is perfect for this. It is accessible to everyone, lets non-technical users offer constructive input and is just incredibly fast to get something basic circula…

Agreed. I've also used (pre-ribbon) Excel effectively for this purpose by drawing the UI using cell background colors and border effects on multiple sheets. Occasionally breaking out some controls and bits of VBA if necessary.

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#104

Post by gogopuppygogo » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:48 PM UTC

chime wrote: post #33

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…

Heck, there are full commercial products being sold built on Filemaker.

I've had the displeasure of managing environments that use software like: http://www.simplyreliable.com/

It was based on FileMaker 6 last I worked with them (circa 2 years ago).

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#105

Post by scholia » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:53 PM UTC

dogma1138 wrote: post #79

kalleboo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first version of MS Word was for MS-DOS, not the Mac

Looks like you are correct Excel 1.0 and Word 1.0 were released for the Mac in 1985, Word 1.0 was released for MS-DOS 18 months earlier. Excel was never released for the MSDOS and both it and Word came to Windows in 1987.

The first Microsoft spreadsheet, which ran on DOS, was called Multiplan.

The graphical versions of Word and Excel were developed for the Mac. Windows versions of Word and Excel superseded the DOS versions of Word and Multiplan.

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#106

Post by scholia » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:54 PM UTC

pmarreck wrote: post #11

martin-adams wrote: post #3

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.

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 think the Macintosh doesn't get enough credit for what it inspired at the time.

I think Microsoft doesn't get enough credit for what it did for the Macintosh ;-)

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#107

Post by scholia » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 8:59 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #96

pivo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember talking to some very unhappy legal secretaries way back then when they were forced to switch from WordPerfect to Word. They used WordPerfect day in and day out and were very efficient at it's keystroke commands and loved it because it was fast. With its focus on the mouse and GUI slowness, Word was a very painful transition and productivity drain for them.

But at least part of that resistance was the tech version of Stockholm Syndrome ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome ). They didn't love WordPerfect because it was better than Word, they loved WordPerfect because it was what they already knew and they had invested a lot of time in learning its idiosyncrasies . Moving to Word meant throwing all that learning out and having to start learning all over agai…

Correct. The sufferings of the ones who'd learned IBM Displaywrite were even worse....

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#108

Post by Keyframe » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:02 PM UTC

cdubzzz wrote: post #102

Keyframe wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90's Apple (the beige phase, hah) users knew about FileMaker. At least in my own little circle. There was even a debate FileMake vs 4D (I was in 4D camp). Weird time to be alive. RAD tools and UML, everything visual basically, seemed to be THE FUTURE. Look at us now.

I forgot all about 4D. At my first real job we had a business management package based on 4D. The website was LAMP and eventually we wanted to offer B2B stuff so I had to build systems to keep 4D and MySQL in sync. Later we purchased and merged with a company using a system with an Oracle backend and for some reason we had to keep the systems separate. So I got to add Oracle in to mix syncing to the website. Fun time…

LAMP? that must've been the tail-end phase then. When I was around these tools (as a kid, but a working kid heh) everything visual was all the rage. We will click solutions away, they've said. Solaris and other cumbersome CLI only crap would go away, they've said. Linux, what is that? - they've said. Fun times, indeed!

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#109

Post by situationista » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:06 PM UTC

hamilyon2 wrote: post #36

babuskov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I also read it as "Four", but now I look at it and it reads "five". Could be some brain trick.

Same for me. Very interesting. Non-native speaker from mobile device

Same. Fascinating.

Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M

#110

Post by scholia » Fri, Jun 10, 2016, 9:07 PM UTC

abritinthebay wrote: post #90

coldcode wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having worked on Persuasion 1.0 (Powerpoint's only real competitor for a while) being part of Office eventually killed Persuasion (when Adobe owned it later) because Powerpoint was "free".

Right, exactly. It came with Word/Excel so basically anyone at an office already had it because they had Office. Never underestimate the power of "it's already installed"

What's more, PowerPoint was pretty much free. The Microsoft Office bundle was cheaper than buying the programs separately. You probably bought Office even if you just wanted Word and Excel.