5 ms·
Another piece of software that I thought made Windows productive in the 90s was Microsoft Publisher. We got this bundled with...something? Maybe a printer? And
by GlennS 7y ago
Another piece of software that I thought made Windows productive in the 90s was Microsoft Publisher.
We got this bundled with...something? Maybe a printer? And I used it a lot for schoolwork. It was clean, neat and powerful. You could use it to layout a page really easily.
At some point they stopped selling it to normal people and brought out Microsoft Home Publishing instead. And of course it was complete crap by comparison.
I have since discovered that Adobe Illustrator is better than both.
- nashashmi 7y agoAdobe indesign is a direct competitor to publisher. I still love publisher.
- ghaff 7y agoOne of the consequences of the Microsoft Office hegemony was that it mostly destroyed the market for apps whose functions could be performed, however awkwardly, by Office programs like Word. Sure you can use InDesign but that’s expensive overkill for a lot of desktop publishing.
- WorldMaker 7y agoI thought Home Publishing was just a bundle of Publisher and Works? That seems to be what searches turn up. They truly killed Works (which was crap), but Publisher still exists in zombie form. Office 365 includes Publisher as do most Office SKUs. Office 365 Home in the Windows Store will install Publisher by default today, but for a long time with Office you had to do a custom install to install it, which is partly why a lot of people thought Publisher was dead because it didn't install by default. That said, Publisher does feel like a zombie compared to the excitement it had in the 90s. I've wondered if that's because we aren't printing as much today (and there's basically no competition in the "desktop publishing" space at all), or if it's just how much of its development resources merged (back) to Word since the 90s.