40 ms·
Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
- pluc 4y agoCan we update the title to reflect that this is a 2016 story about a 1987 event
- willbw 4y agoOne could probably infer that no?
- tinus_hn 4y agoNo, it’s customary to add [2016] to links to old articles to make clear that it is not news.
- willbw 4y agoFair enough, I was referring to the fact that Microsoft buying PowerPoint didn't happen recently. But that wasn't clear from my comment.
- pluc 4y ago"How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M" would be more accurate, and it's the actual headline. Without the "How" it looks like news.
- jasim 4y agoThe "How" was stripped by HN from the title. Edited and fixed it.
- pauliephonic 4y agoIf Apple had succeeded in buying Powerpoint, whatever alternative Microsoft purchased (or made) would have become the de facto standard anyway.
- mc32 4y agoHarvard Graphics!
- ghaff 4y agoI used that for a few years outputting slides to transparencies on a pen plotter. There was some other pre-Powerpoint program I used on PCs back then too but don't remember the name--may have been Lotus Freelance. (And a minicomputer-based program before those.)
- Gravityloss 4y agoMirage was one too. It was hard to use.
- ghaff 4y agoThose were the days when you had all manner of different word processing and graphics programs (among other things--though Lotus had mostly standardized people on 1-2-3 before Excel and Microsoft Office came along).
- Gravityloss 4y agoThat software understood the difference between data and presentation.
- astatine 4y agoIt's been decades since I heard of Harvard Graphics. Was part of my toolkit with WordStar, Lotus 123, FoxPro and NC. MS C6.0, MASM, CodeWarrior, an editor called Brief on the dev side. Good times.
- bombcar 4y agoWow, Harvard Graphics apparently stuck around until 2017 - http://www.harvardgraphics.com http://www.harvardgraphics.com 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.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago… and destroyed the global productivity gains brought by automation for generations.
- JohnJamesRambo 4y agoReminded of this story- https://theweek.com/articles/673091/general-mattis-save-military-ban-powerpoint 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
- politelemon 4y agoReading through this, I see the problems have nothing to do with Powerpoint, and everything to do with organizational inefficiencies. Powerpoint is the scapegoat. > 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.
- Hammershaft 4y agoDo you have a source for the Amazon statement being false?\ https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/jeff-bezos-this-is-the-smartest-thing-we-ever-did-at-amazon.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/14/jeff-bezos-this-is-the-smart...
- jen20 4y agoI was in a call with some folks from Amazon (AWS) yesterday where they presented via PowerPoint.
- gigatexal 4y agoGood. Had they bought PowerPoint and then became successful they’d get big, rich, and lazy. And we’d never have gotten the iMac or later the iPhone.
- QuarterReptile 4y agoPowerPoint is not, and never had been, the crown jewel of Office, which is Excel.
- ghaff 4y agoExcel was the product that really overwhelmed the competition--including Lotus 1-2-3--when the world transitioned to Windows. Word and Powerpoint were decent programs but there were plenty of competitive options out there. But getting Powerpoint and Word for "free" as part of a Microsoft bundle pretty much sealed the deal. (And arguably pretty much froze office suites in amber.)
- fortran77 4y agoI still use Excel all the time. Most of my work is digital signal processing, and I use the Complex number features in Excel for analysis.
- Grustaf 4y agoMore importantly, we wouldn't have Keynote and we'd be stuck using Powerpoint
- ascagnel_ 4y agoI doubt it. By 1987, Office was already well on its way to its dominant position, and whatever presentation tool Microsoft bought would have become the de facto presentation tool, be it PowerPoint, Keynote, or some other tool that's been forgotten, simply because it was available in a package the business was already buying.
- PopAlongKid 4y agoIs "1987" a typo? "[Office] was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_office
- sk8terboi 4y ago
- iakh 4y agoWhat was the reasoning for pursuing a 14m offer from Microsoft over multiple others at 18m?
- lotsofpulp 4y agoAn offer is only as good as the buyer’s trustworthiness. It seems like they trusted Microsoft the most to close quickly and cleanly. The quotes around “firm” for Borland’s offer and description of laborious dealing with Xerox make it seem like the buyers thought $4M more was not worth the headache. > 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.”
- Someone 4y agoReading the article, the alternatives were - 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.
- kgwgk 4y agoSomewhat related: Matt Levine yesterday on the offers for Spirit https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-28/don-t-cheat-on-the-ethics-exam https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-28/don-t-...
- coldcode 4y agoPersuasion was better than Powerpoint in every way; but even when Adobe bought it from Aldus, it could not compete with "free" i.e. PP being part of Office, and did not last long in the 90's. Office also basically killed word processing innovation and spreadsheet innovation for a long time. 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.
- neovive 4y agoLotus held their own for a while and forced some innovation in the spreadsheet market. Outside of spreadsheets, the bundling of Word, Powerpoint, and Access was too dominant on Windows -- especially since the previously dominant tools were mainly running on DOS (e.g. WordPerfect).
- listenallyall 4y agoNot sure about this. Lotus 1-2-3 for Windows, at least around 1991-92, was awful. Excel was far smoother, faster, easier.
- nojito 4y agoKeynote is vastly better than PowerPoint. Apple made the right call in the end.
- PinguTS 4y agoYou know, that there was no Keynote in the 1980 and 1990. There was no Keynote before MacOS X at all. As much as I like Keynote, it is still very limited in many ways. One not so unimportant, it is Apple only.
- edf13 4y agoI use Keynote on Windows... via the iCloud website. It is Keynote, although a little more limited - but it works for me.
- 4y ago
- indigodaddy 4y agoI would imagine they now wished they had taken the MSFT stock…
- tecleandor 4y agoOh yeah. True, hindsight is 20/20 (same as with crypto assets) but that'd be more than 7 billion today...
- asddubs 4y agoThe article year is kind of confusing on this one, it made me go "that can't be right, Microsoft owned PowerPoint before then... didn't it?"
- wongarsu 4y agoThe HN title has gone through quite a few iterations by now. - 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.
- salgernon 4y agoIt’s weird how Apple is part of the title when they’re barely mentioned.
- abruzzi 4y agoUsually, a year in parentheses on a HN post indicates the publiction date of the article--specifically when the article isn't current--not the dates of the events recounted. In this case the article is from 2016 as the date suggests.
- asddubs 4y agoyup, I actually know about that, but it still made me do a double-take
- linguae 4y agoA world where Apple had acquired PowerPoint in 1987 could have hurt Apple's own HyperCard, which was also released in 1987. HyperCard did have its moment of success from its release in 1987 to roughly the mid-1990s. 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.
- JKCalhoun 4y agoThat's interesting — Hypercard as preso software. 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.
- bombcar 4y agoThere was a moment when the creators of the presentation and the presenters were able to become one - just like Excel took number fiddling from the dedicated wizards to any manager, so to did Powerpoint take slide decks from the slide wizards to the managers. It took a bit to catch on but once it did it was wildfire.
- alain94040 4y agoHypercard was very much a presentation software. It had the best animations at the time, compared to Powerpoint. And it supported features that seem obvious once you hear about them: from any slide (card), you could click on an element of the slide, and it would take you to another slide about that element. Powerpoint is still mostly focused on linear "next slide" all the time. 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.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
- s1mon 4y agoIf you really want to read more than you ever wanted to know about the history of powerpoint, Robert Gaskins - one of the creators - wrote a whole book of the history [0] and has a detailed web site with tons more details [1]. [0] https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu... [1] https://www.robertgaskins.com https://www.robertgaskins.com
- april_22 4y agoMight be a different.. but interesting read. Thank you.
- A_Venom_Roll 4y agoOver 500 pages is a bit daunting, is it a worthwhile read?
- WoodenChair 4y agoIt’s pretty good. Could it have been 100 pages shorter? Sure. But it’s rare you get a seminal software project’s history and design decisions documented so well by one of its key creators. We turned some of they key points from the book into a podcast episode: https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/c2d1ba5d/powerpoint https://pnc.st/s/kopec-explains-software/c2d1ba5d/powerpoint
- A_Venom_Roll 4y agoThank you, might check it out.
- cruano 4y agoAre you asking for a PowerPoint presentation ?
- janandonly 4y agoAnd the book can be downloaded from his website, for free. Check: https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
- PinguTS 4y agoThe article is interesting in the part of buying PowerPoint. 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.
- tssva 4y agoForethought was the distributor of FileMaker and not the developer. After Microsoft acquired Forethought the developer, Nashoba, directly distributed FileMaker. Eventually Nashoba was purchased by Claris which was a division of Apple. Claris was later renamed to FileMaker.
- PinguTS 4y agoThanks. Yeah, remember working with Claris Filemaker on MacOS 9. But didn't knew that Forethought was "just" a distributor to this product. Thanks for clearing this up.
- gwbas1c 4y ago> Key personnel, to be named (but certainly including all the senior developers and me), would be required to agree to relocate to Redmond as a condition of the deal. 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.
- tiffanyh 4y agoIt's not for those times. Two things: 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.
- gwbas1c 4y agoThe article was very clear that "Key personnel ... including all the senior developers and me"
- p_l 4y agoInterestingly enough, in IT remote work started pretty early - first you had various homegrown setups at companies and universities (BBN, Project MAC at MIT, etc), and IBM starting a telecommute option in 1979 with 5 employees, and having over 2000 employees working remotely by 1983.
- thanatropism 4y agoThis sounds like a stereotype, but I use Beamer whenever I can. 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.
- wellthisisgreat 4y agoKeynote was one of the eye-opening moments for me when switching from Win to Mac, and one of the big reasons I am committed to staying in Apple’s ecosystem.
- dingosity 4y agoI love these first hand accounts from the 80s. 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.
- devinegan 4y agoAlso recommend https://www.folklore.org/index.py https://www.folklore.org/index.py if you like 80s tech stories.
- dingosity 4y agoI think I'm mentioned in one or two of the folklore.org stories.
- ahmed_ds 4y ago> I love these first hand accounts from the 80s. 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. [0] https://www.youtube.com/c/DavesGarage https://www.youtube.com/c/DavesGarage
- IntelMiner 4y agoDave had like three or four good stories but then realized it was easier to farm clicks by thumping his credentials while making absolutely trite content 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?"
- yeaso9 4y ago
- re 4y agoI was curious what PowerPoint looked like in 1987 and found this video of someone exploring a sample presentation that came with it: https://vimeo.com/181999729 https://vimeo.com/181999729
- alluro2 4y agoThanks, that was interesting to see. For what was probably tens of kilobytes in size, and seeing the sample presentation with images, charts, bullet points etc, as well as some of the options in the menus, I have to say it doesn't seem that much limited when it comes to essential functionality, compared to the current 1GB version :)
- hbn 4y ago> There is a lot of convoluted bit shifting that occurs in order to get the address and data from a Game Genie. This is probably to make the Game Genie codes seem more magical. After all, given 2 Game Genie codes, one that granted 5 lives on startup and another code that granted 9 lives, and the only difference between the 2 codes was one character, even a novice player could probably figure out that modifying that one character to any of the acceptable letter characters would grant between 1 and 16 lives on startup. 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
- ppg677 4y agoAmazing the comments here. I've used nothing but Google Sheets for 14 years now.
- Maursault 4y agoFTA: > It was the first significant acquisition made by Microsoft. Nope! That honor goes to 86-DOS 1.10, acquired by Microsoft for $75K in July 1981.