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.
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%.
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.
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).
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?