5 ms·

> I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. Th

by itomato 10y ago

> I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success."

scholia 10y ago
> The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS. Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.
- eschaton 10y ago
  Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Microsoft applications like Multiplan were available for a variety of platforms, running CP/M and a variety of other operating systems. You could get Multiplan for systems as small as the TI-99/4 and as large as Xenix!
  - scholia 10y ago
    > Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Not actually true. DOS was already done when Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox Parc to start its application division in 1981. Multiplan and Word were the first results, released in 1983, by which time it was obvious that Lotus 1-2-3 was going to win. Simonyi had big ideas about "metaprogramming" and using what was basically a VM to make applications portable. (I ran Multiplan on a Tandy 100-style portable, where the program came on a chip!) In an interview, Simonyi said: QUOTE "Multiplan was done on a byte-coded interpreting system, much like Java. It was probably the most ported system ever deployed. We thought that the market would be fractured for a long time and that we would be on all of those machines -- which we were. "Interestingly enough, MS-DOS changed that and created a unified market. And, of course, Lotus 1-2-3 made their bet on creating a single, optimized, direct implementation for MS-DOS, and they cleaned up. We learned a lot from that failure. And then of course, when the next shift came to GUIs [graphical user interfaces], we cleaned their clock with Excel." https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0,10801,76413,00.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.comput...
    - flomo 10y ago
      Supposedly, Microsoft Office used a bytecode language for a long time afterward, at least into the 1990s. Old time Mac users probably remember MS Office 4.2, which was an identical clone of the Windows version and ran like molasses.
- itomato 10y ago
  I believe the context is 'apps on Mac'.
  - scholia 10y ago
    "The first Microsoft apps for the Mac were Excel and Word" would, of course, be correct. Microsoft was the Mac's biggest supporter, and Bill Gates appeared on stage at the Mac launch. For which he has been richly rewarded with decades of Apple fanboy bile ;-)

by itomato 10y ago

scholia 10y ago

> The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. Nice quote otherwise, but this bit is not actually true. Microsoft got into apps via Word and Multiplan on DOS. Excel and Word for the Mac were its first graphical applications.

eschaton 10y ago
Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Microsoft applications like Multiplan were available for a variety of platforms, running CP/M and a variety of other operating systems. You could get Multiplan for systems as small as the TI-99/4 and as large as Xenix!
- scholia 10y ago
  > Microsoft got into applications before DOS existed. Not actually true. DOS was already done when Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi from Xerox Parc to start its application division in 1981. Multiplan and Word were the first results, released in 1983, by which time it was obvious that Lotus 1-2-3 was going to win. Simonyi had big ideas about "metaprogramming" and using what was basically a VM to make applications portable. (I ran Multiplan on a Tandy 100-style portable, where the program came on a chip!) In an interview, Simonyi said: QUOTE "Multiplan was done on a byte-coded interpreting system, much like Java. It was probably the most ported system ever deployed. We thought that the market would be fractured for a long time and that we would be on all of those machines -- which we were. "Interestingly enough, MS-DOS changed that and created a unified market. And, of course, Lotus 1-2-3 made their bet on creating a single, optimized, direct implementation for MS-DOS, and they cleaned up. We learned a lot from that failure. And then of course, when the next shift came to GUIs [graphical user interfaces], we cleaned their clock with Excel." https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/software/appdev/story/0,10801,76413,00.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080905231519/http://www.comput...
  - flomo 10y ago
    Supposedly, Microsoft Office used a bytecode language for a long time afterward, at least into the 1990s. Old time Mac users probably remember MS Office 4.2, which was an identical clone of the Windows version and ran like molasses.
itomato 10y ago
I believe the context is 'apps on Mac'.
- scholia 10y ago
  "The first Microsoft apps for the Mac were Excel and Word" would, of course, be correct. Microsoft was the Mac's biggest supporter, and Bill Gates appeared on stage at the Mac launch. For which he has been richly rewarded with decades of Apple fanboy bile ;-)