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Persuasion 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
by coldcode 4y ago
Persuasion 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.
- kalleboo 4y agoHuh I always assumed Apple had acquired Concurrence but reality turns out to be far more interesting - the developers were acquired by Sun of all people to develop an OpenStep and then Java office suite...
- p_l 4y agoEven funnier, when Sun showed Looking Glass desktop demo, Jobs apparently called Schwartz with a Cease & Desist demand. Schwartz reportedly answered with equivalent of "nice presentation program you have there, would be a shame if it was canceled for copyright infringement" and the C&D was dropped.
- astrange 4y agoRelated, everyone’s favorite Office feature WordArt was Scott Forstall’s intern project at MS before he led the creation of iOS.
- duxup 4y agoKeynote somehow always looks amazing, but is also pretty limited compared to power point. Having said that ... it also gets the same job done so being limited maybe isn't so bad.
- sdoering 4y agoI always said I would miss keynote the most when dropping Mac. I still miss a bit of the ease which with you could create beautiful slides given a decent master. 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.
- duxup 4y agoEvery time I dip into PowerPoint it feels so hard to make things not ... look bad.
- innocentoldguy 4y agoI agree. I think Keynote's limitations are a solid feature. Presentations should be basic slides with a minimal amount of important information on them. PowerPoints features are excessive and I've seen those features lead to disastrous, in my opinion, presentation experiences.
- april_22 4y agoNon-Apple user here. Just out of curiosity: what makes Keynote better than Powerpoint?
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- ch_sm 4y agoPersonal opinion. The animations are smoother and better designed, the templates are nicer, the UI is simpler, the default fonts they ship with are more recognizable and render better (at least on hi-res displays), and it feels a little easier on CPU and Memory.
- bombcar 4y agoKeynote is more limited than Powerpoint; but unless you're a Powerpoint wizard, Keynote has much better defaults and styles. I've yet to see a Keynote deck that cannot be replicated in Powerpoint; but the average user seems to make better ones in Keynote unless they have a designed template that they stick to very carefully.
- jedberg 4y ago> I've yet to see a Keynote deck that cannot be replicated in Powerpoint; 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.
- mvidal01 4y agoDoesn't the content and the public speaking skills of the presenter play a role?
- jedberg 4y agoI mean of course it does, but if you have a great speaker with great content and a crappy deck, it really takes away from the message. But if you have a good speaker with good content and an amazing deck, it enhances the message so much that that presentation is perceived very highly. Yes, you need good content and a good speaker as a baseline, but assuming you have that, the deck is what makes the difference.
- Spooky23 4y agoKeynote looks great but is essentially unchanged for almost 20 years. PowerPoint is less awful in many ways than it was.
- p_l 4y agoConsidering that the first releases were cloning an existing program to the point that threat of copyright infringement suit was seen as legitimate, I suspect certain things were forbidden to change at least so long as Jobs lived.
- arbitrary_name 4y agoI consulted at Apple for a while, and many people there preferred to use PowerPoint. I was given permission to work with PowerPoint to prevent issues when working with other teams and vendors who did not have keynote. 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.
- xattt 4y ago> Their excel competitor, the name of which i don't recall … I think they named after whatever spreadsheets are used for calculating, something like Apple Digits or Numerals or Figures. Does anyone else remember?
- bdowling 4y agoIt's called Numbers. I prefer it to Libre Office Calc. Neither are perfect substitutes for a person who really needs Excel though.
- lotsofpulp 4y agoPretty sure xattt was attempting humor.
- bdowling 4y agoWhoosh. Thanks.
- KerrAvon 4y agoProbably depends on the specific team, but I’ve never seen anyone at Apple use anything but Keynote since shortly after it became available. Apple is very sensitive to design, and Keynote’s default templates provide good design out of the box.
- outside1234 4y agoPersuasion (and the rest) was not better in the business sense. 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.
- pooper 4y agoMaybe this is obvious but this sound like zoom vs Microsoft teams story just in the past.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoOthers also recognized this (Borland / WordPerfect aligning, and WordPerfect’s strategy was “we interact with other industry leading applications” (like 1-2-3) way before the days of Windows) but they failed to execute for other reasons, so it wasn’t like Microsoft figured out something else others didn’t. They used their first mover advantage and control of the platform to outmaneuver the competition.
- Arainach 4y agoWordPerfect couldn't even work well with itself and bungled the transition from DOS to GUI hard. Word's biggest advantage was that it worked great on Windows, while WordPerfect had to tiptoe around offending their existing DOS experts. 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.
- mgoetzke 4y agoI still remember how many minutes it took to boot WordPerfect on the schools 486DX2 66Mhz ... I could time it to play a round of doom on another machine next to it.
- happyopossum 4y ago
- r00fus 4y agoA study in network effects and defacto standards-based monopoly.
- philistine 4y agoUnsurprisingly, the one company still having a separate vision in the office application space is Apple. Pages, Numbers and Keynote are opinionated and very different from Office and the also-ran. The simple idea that your buttons for a Pages document are on the right side and scroll down is a genius use of space, yet Word et al. insist on the crappy top drawers of nonsense.
- lloydatkinson 4y agoDo you have a screenshot of this?
- hbn 4y agoMicrosoft's ribbon UI is such a cluttered mess of a design paradigm. Who knows, maybe once you've memorized it, it's efficient. But for the amount I use the Office apps, nothing is ever where I'd expect it to be. And the layout is just insane, there's differently shaped buttons and groupings of functionality, etc. It's like they just came up with a bunch of icons for the different functionality and haphazardly dumped them all over in random tabs.
- jmmv 4y agoThis. I only really started using Office about a year ago (after decades of being off Windows)… and… what a mess. I remember the ribbon being touted as “the next big thing” in UI design when it came out but I just don’t see how that makes any sense.
- systoll 4y agoI really wish MS had worked on bringin their 2008, pages-inspired mac UI to windows rather than bringing the ribbon to the Mac. https://appleinsider.com/articles/07/11/14/road_to_mac_office_2008_word_08_vs_pages_3_0 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.
- bachmeier 4y agoI strongly preferred Quattro Pro to Excel. By the late 90s, it ceased to exist in university computer labs, because every new computer came bundled with Office. I had only a mild preference for WordPerfect, but the QP to Excel migration was painful.
- nray 4y agoAnd Freehand was better than Illustrator IMHO, but Adobe bundled Illustrator with Photoshop to schools and so we lost a great drawing and layout tool.
- Forgeties79 4y agoRIP Gimp
- spikej 4y agoI loved how well the Macromedia products played with each other. Freehand -> Flash or Director just WORKED! Illustrator to these failed miserably.
- sleepdreamy 4y agoMicrosoft has a straight up monopoly on Corporate Domains/Operating Systems. Interesting to me that people complain about Amazon/AWS but noone mentions Microsoft being a huge behemoth. Domains..365 Suite..AD etc;
- tmccrary55 4y agoYou must be new to the industry
- sleepdreamy 4y agoI am! About a year in now.
- jamiek88 4y agoI did a genuine double take there. ‘No one complains about Microsoft being a behemoth’. Erm….what?
- tiahura 4y agoThere’s no M in FAAnG.
- jamiek88 4y agoI’ve always thought it should be faamg anyway!
- makeitdouble 4y agoOn that part, I never understood why people put Netflix in there, except for making it easier to pronounce. Netflix feels neither like a sheer evil corporation nor an abusive quasi monopoly, nor a giant in any specific way (why would we put Netflix in front of Disney for instance?)
- selcuka 4y agoIt's all about stock value [1]: > 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%. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/faang-stocks.asp
- listenallyall 4y ago> Office also basically killed word processing innovation 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).