6 ms·
Say what you will about MS (and I said a lot when I worked at Lotus on the mainframe port of Lotus 1-2-3) but they knew what was important for success. A sprea
by beachy 2y ago
Say what you will about MS (and I said a lot when I worked at Lotus on the mainframe port of Lotus 1-2-3) but they knew what was important for success.
A spreadsheet on it's own is a thing of technical beauty but for market domination you don't want to keep pouring resources into that one product, you want a suite of complimentary products.
You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document, into a slide presentation. You want cutting and pasting to work sensibly between products. You want consistency in the menus and layouts.
Bill Gates understood all of this from the beginning, the same as he understood that the strength of a PC operating system is not how reliable, memory safe and performant it is, it's in how flashy it looks and how important the windows paradigm is.
- mixmastamyk 2y agoYes, however this story is from before that, the early DOS era. No standards for UI or drivers etc.
- readyplayernull 2y ago> You want to be able to embed your spreadsheet into a document, into a slide presentation. I mean, MS made ActiveX and it was a security risk: https://www.wired.com/1996/11/will-activex-threaten-national-security/ https://www.wired.com/1996/11/will-activex-threaten-national...
- mtmail 2y agoIf I recall being able to embed an Excel spreadsheet into a Word document was OLE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding
- smackeyacky 2y agoPlease write a blog post about this - are you saying you had Lotus 1-2-3 working on a 3270 terminal and they sold it?
- electroly 2y agoThis product was publicly known; it was called Lotus "1-2-3/M" and you can find a little information (not a lot) by googling for that name. The Wikipedia article for 1-2-3 also cites a few scanned articles from the time, although sadly they also have some broken citations here.
- beachy 2y agoNo blog posts coming but yes, a port of lotus 123 that worked beautifully on terminals of the day particularly3279 colour terminal. The premise was that people were already pushing the limits and building incredibly elaborate systems on spreadsheets, so why not go to the next level and leverage the huge processing power of big iron. Actually a very solid idea and I worked with a few progressive customers that bought into it. My job was as a sales engineer, helping customers adopt it in Europe, particularly Scandanavia. It's Tuesday so it must be Copenhagen. What a great job and a super team in lotus at the time.
- smackeyacky 2y agoNow that is awesome. I worked at a place that had the sun version of 1-2-3 running for a guy who had blown the memory limit of the MS-DOS version during that awkward period where windows still wasn’t quite a thing. That spreadsheet gave us nightmares
- BlueTemplar 2y ago> the strength of a PC operating system is not how reliable, memory safe and performant it is Didn't OS/2 fail because it wasn't performant enough, compared to Windows/DOS which could run on pretty shitty PCs ?
- beachy 2y agoAs I remember it, OS/2 failed mainly because IBM were a day late and a dollar short with presentation manager, the gui for OS/2. Customers unfavourably compared the dull character mode appearance of OS/2 to the flashiness of Windows.
- timbit42 2y agoOS/2 v2 and later versions had replaced Presentation Manager with Workplace Shell. It was great. Fully object-oriented. Very powerful.
- Blackstrat 2y agoOS/2 ran circles around Windows NT. It's API was one of the best defined that I had worked with. Certainly better than anything for Windows. I worked for an IBM subsidiary in the early 90s. IBM was just never sufficiently committed to OS/2 IMO. Hence it ultimately went away. But programming on Warp was a great experience. And for a while at least, OS/2 was very well established in the banking industry.
- BlueTemplar 2y agoBut wouldn't the banking industry have been able to afford the (relatively) powerful computers to run it well ?
- Blackstrat 2y agoWe were running the same hardware as the rest of the world - nothing high end. OS/2 always outperformed NT regardless of the hardware. And it didn’t need to be rebooted everyday.
- hnlmorg 2y agoWhat you’re describing there better fits Microsoft’s competition than Windows itself. Microsoft don’t even follow their own UI guidelines with regards to toolbars and menus (how often have they built bespoke widgets for Office rather than using their public APIs?). Bill Gates was a great businessman. Microsoft succeeded because Gates knew how to make deals with suppliers et al. Much has been written about the good (IBM bundling) and bad (threatening retailers who shipped PCs with alternative operating systems) already though. However if you want to talk about the UI consistency or flashiness of computers in the 80s and 90s, then you’re better off looking at Apple Macs, Amiga, Acorn Electron, or even Atari before you look at Windows and DOS.
- wslh 2y agoMicrosoft success cannot be explained by the old story with IBM. Obviously Bill Gates has/had amazing skills, was lucky to born in a rich family, to be in the IBM deal, etc. All condiments that does not explain the Microsoft success until today. I think Microsoft has a record of unsuccessful projects while being successful as a business, as you say they don't use their own UI offerings and had zilliones but look at their balance sheet... If it were by the original IBM tale, Xerox and others dead companies were thriving. I recommend to read "Idea Man", Paul Allen (Microsoft cofounder) autobiography. You will realize there was an incredible Bill Gates before the IBM deal. Also check the non-official chronicles of Bill Gates in "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" [2] (1993). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man [2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292 https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp...
- hnlmorg 2y agoEvery successful company has had unsuccessful products and of course people born into money are more likely to be successful themselves. You’re also focusing too much on IBM specifically. I didn’t say IBM made Microsoft successful, I said it was an example of a deal Gates successfully negotiated.
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- kragen 2y agoa lot of good indian or indian-american programmers signed on at microsoft in the early 80s and didn't get whispering campaigns started about them in management and then didn't quit. retaining adept hackers (without strong morals, at least) was and is one of microsoft's strong points. imagine where visicorp could be if they'd been able to retain people like this
- jnaina 2y agoI remember being on a call, while at CSC, to discuss moving one of our projects to our team in our Indian subsidiary. One of the folks on the call, in his texan drawl cooly mentioned, "What next? Train dogs and cats on software development?". Oh the joys of being brown in the Tech Industry.
- kragen 2y agough not to limit this to texans (racism is pretty widespread, especially in the usa) but the especial intensity of racism was one of the things my mother called out as a primary reason she left texas as soon as she could was this recently do you suppose he'd heard of sanjay ghemawat or raj reddy
- jnaina 2y agoAbout 8 years ago. Doubt he would heard of both these gentlemen.