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How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
111–120 of 153 posts
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#112Dante created a new circle of Hell for PowerPoint
Inferno or not, PowerPoint is a special product, for you can buy hardware to control it.
An image search on PowerPoint remote will fill the screen with different devices.
What other windows app has that same kind of hardware support?
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#113I 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…
I was shocked the first time I saw someone use Powerpoint to make diagrams for an academic paper. Then I realized it's the closest thing to a real vector graphics editor in a typical person's toolbox. I won't stop being an Illustrator/LaTeX snob for my own work, but I can't fault people for using something they already know to get the job done and move on.
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#114Random 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.
It's a sad day when one regrets UML.
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Halo, one of the Xbox's most popular games, had its first version (first one you could buy, i mean) on Mac
No, Microsoft bought Bungie while Halo was in development, you could never buy Halo for Mac.
I own and still play Halo for Mac frequently. Not sure what you mean.
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#116Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Amiga will never die [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] ;) (become irrelevant to the vast majority, sure). That last link is for a new FPGA based M68k clone that adds additional instructions, pipelining and other fun stuff as an accelerator for classic Amiga's (it sprung out of the ashes of the now defunct "Natami" project to create a new M68k compatible Amiga-compatible machine). [1] http://www.a-eon.com/?page=x1000 [2] ht…
I love Amiga fans - they are a special type of awesome/crazy!
As someone who has contributed code to AROS (AmigaOS compatible portable OS), I can confirm we're crazy. For my part I'm not hardcore enough to have any Amigas any more, though I want to (I have a Minimig, though - an FPGA re-implementation).
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. It's kind of ironic how nowadays I prefer using Vim for coding and other tasks. And I also find myself preferring Markdown more and more whenever I can for a variety of tasks, from planning meetings to preparing presentations.
It's kind of ironic how nowadays more people are using Vim. Are they? Based on my totally unscientific observations vi(m)s popularity has dropped over the past 15-20 years
I think a lot of people are using vim emulators that bring the modal concept and keybindings in other software. Maybe NeoVim will eventually change this once vim can be embedded in a decent GUI and have addons that don't slow the how thing down to a crawl.
P.S. I love vim but I love it enough to recognise flaws.
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> The keystroke-based interface was trashed by critics. It's kind of ironic how nowadays I prefer using Vim for coding and other tasks. And I also find myself preferring Markdown more and more whenever I can for a variety of tasks, from planning meetings to preparing presentations.
Vim is a tiny fraction of a percent of word processor usage. Most people like GUIs.
How awesome would vim key bindings for Libreoffice be though?
Re: How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M
#120Random 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.
It's juvenile, but I can't help laughing at "Visual Basic-ally."