Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
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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.
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?"
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).
They do not provide uni-dimensional entertainment for ages.
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.
As much as I like Keynote, it is still very limited in many ways. One not so unimportant, it is Apple only.
Having said that ... it also gets the same job done so being limited maybe isn't so bad.
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.
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.
Yes, you need good content and a good speaker as a baseline, but assuming you have that, the deck is what makes the difference.
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.
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:
Also it exports to video. Which I think Powerpoint doesn’t do? (Older version at least)
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.
This is definitely a YMMV situation.
It was made for Jobs' keynotes as its main goal
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.
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 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.
I think they named after whatever spreadsheets are used for calculating, something like Apple Digits or Numerals or Figures.
Does anyone else remember?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Microsoft never did this, but Apple did. And still does today.
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.
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.
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.
> 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%.
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).
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 entirely
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".
I think Excel and Word were originally Mac products.
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.
I like nothing else about Reader.
You might take a look at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RpNFa6_OiY
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).
I used to work on Agfa’s RIP back in the day.
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.
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.
Was there anything like the After Dark screensaver on Windows before it exploded on the Mac scene?
I’ve also had a product I worked on in a keynote by Jobs. A nervous time.
[0] https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/c2d1ba5d/powerpoint
Check: https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/jeff-bezos-this-is-the-smart...
Overall, there isn't a ban on use but it has a very limited use compared to many other companies.
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.
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.
> 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.”
- 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.
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.
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!
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.
- 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.
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
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.
"[Office] was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas."
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.
Thanks for clearing this up.
Nope! That honor goes to 86-DOS 1.10, acquired by Microsoft for $75K in July 1981.