5 ms·

Interesting article but I'm not sure some of the statements chime with how things looked at the time (IME ofc). I got involved in IT as a profession in 1995 an

• jimt1234 2y ago
  I started my career in '95, too, and yeah, as difficult as it is to believe now, Microsoft's monopoly wasn't yet assured. The OS market was pretty much locked up (OS/2 Warp???), but as I recall, Wordperfect was the big obstacle in the office-suite space. It had a massive userbase, especially in markets that were not friendly to change (law offices). IMHO, the big boost for Microsoft was when they adopted the Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect file formats. Now there was a product that costs less (free, with a new PC), and was compatible with all the existing docs/data. Game over.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    1995 was the tipping point. Windows 95 came out and WordPerfect was late coming up with a good Windows app.
    • thr0w 2y ago
      In my memory (was young at the time), 95 coming out was such a huge event. Something about its emphasis on multimedia experience really changed the whole feel of the PC, at least for me. 3.1 was like this arcane puzzle, but 95 felt personable.
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        It was a very big deal. It was introduced with the help of Jay Leno. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv0PxINy2ds https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv0PxINy2ds People lined up for it.
        • ryandrake 2y ago
          Don’t forget the Rolling Stones Start Me Up was the marketing song. We ‘leet hackers all joked that it was entirely appropriate for “Windoze’s” theme song to include the lyrics “You make a grown man cry.” Those were the days!
          • canucker2016 2y ago
            Less than four months until Win95/Office95 turns 30.
          • spauldo 2y ago
            It also has the line "You make a dead man cum." I always wondered how Microsoft's marketing department let that one pass.
            • hulitu 2y ago
              I guess the decisive line was: You make a grown man cry. It is valid, even today, for all Microsoft products.
  • wkat4242 2y ago
    Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically. The main issue was that it was also a bit too ambitious in terms of system requirements which meant that on most systems it was slow as molasses really. Add that to the Microsoft first mover advantage and it was doomed to fail.
    • nine_k 2y ago
      I ran OS/2 v 3 on a machine with 8 megabytes (sic) of RAM quite smoothly. But I had to choose: either I enable TCP/IP networking and disable the Win16 emulator, or the other way around. If I enabled both, the machine started to swap to disk too much. Win95 worked well on such a machine, and even worked tolerably on machines with 4 MB RAM, which were still around. It lacked the nice true multitasking, because it was basically running on a DOS extender, like most large DOS games. But you could run win32 programs, win16 programs, DOS programs, and have TCP/IP and thus access the Internet all at the same time. It was a killer combination. Also, it had a really thought-out GUI, a big upgrade compared to Win 3.1. (Far from the coolness of OS/2 WPS, but...)
      • wkat4242 2y ago
        Yeah that's the thing, OS/2 really was way better (at least when Warp came around because the earlier versions were really mediocre). It was really IBM's last try to revert the mistake they had made with Microsoft back in the early days of the IBM PC. They failed to see its potential. The desktop really reminded me of HP/Apollo's VUE (which later got turned into CDE when Sun and IBM joined the project). Especially due to the large "dock".
    • FirmwareBurner 2y ago
      >Os/2 warp was miles ahead of windows 95 technically Did it run DOOM and Quake? I think that's what decided what OS was gonna succeed.
      • mathgeek 2y ago
        It did, both in that OS/2 was backwards compatible with DOS, and that the games were ported. https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2 https://doomwiki.org/wiki/OS/2 https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html https://www.os2site.com/sw/games/action/quake/index.html
• cyberax 2y ago
  I was only starting working with computers as an unpaid IT help at that time, but I distinctly remember that MS Office was just better. More streamlined, and well-integrated. Back then, pretty much everybody in my country just pirated the software, so the cost was not a consideration at all.
  • nine_k 2y ago
    MSO 97 was the pinnacle of usability and customizability per megabyte installed. I only wish it were not so buggy when handling large documents.
    • hulitu 2y ago
      That's why they replaced it. /s
• tiahura 2y ago
  By 95 it was game over. WP for Windows sucked. Quatro Pro was dying. Office 95 was the final nail.
• Nition 2y ago
  > They started giving away a full office suite with every new PC Do you mean Microsoft Works[1]? Or were they more commonly shipping the full version of MS Office with new PCs in the UK? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Works
  • ijidak 2y ago
    Works... Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.... I almost forgot about Works. That was the word processor for those of us without a lot of money in those days.
    • Nition 2y ago
      Microsoft Works 4.0 came with our first PC. It was all we used for quite a while.
  • raesene9 2y ago
    In the case I dealt with, I was buying new Gateway PCs and they were shipping full Office Pro (including MS Access) for free with the PC. The company I worked for at the time were pretty cost conscious so there was no way they would buy additional Wordperfect or Lotus 1-2-3 licenses on top of that, even though some of the staff much preferred those products.
• ryukoposting 2y ago
  It's worth noting that Microsoft was the first company to sell a complete office suite as a bundle for the PC. Others quickly caught on, but still MS Office was the only suite that had consistent UX across the different programs they were packaging together. Lotus SmartSuite checked all the same boxes on paper, but switching between the different programs feels like tripping on cracks in the sidewalk.
  • scarface_74 2y ago
    Well actually… AppleWorks came out in 1984 for the Apple //e. Microsoft Office came out for the Mac in 1989.
    • ryukoposting 2y ago
      "For the PC" is an important qualifier in my message above. I'm familiar with AppleWorks.
      • scarface_74 2y ago
        Fair enough. I was thinking about “PC” in the literal since not the common vernacular - x86 + Microsoft OS
        • ryukoposting 2y ago
          There's an interesting debate there. Here's my thesis on it: Isolating the definiton of "PC" to the IBM lineage makes it a lot easier to contextualize the historical development of home computing. Example: my TRS-80 is a microcomputer, but it is not a PC. This is a sentence that younger generations can grok. If I say "my TRS-80 is a PC but not an IBM PC-compatible" their eyes glaze over.
          • hulitu 2y ago
            > Isolating the definiton of "PC" to the IBM lineage makes it a lot easier to contextualize the historical development of home computing The definition of PC is IBM PC. That's why Visual Workstation is not a PC, Apollo DN3500 was not a PC, etc.
• ijidak 2y ago
  Agree! If I remember correctly, Wordperfect and Word were neck and neck until Word 6.0. Wordperfect and Word 5 were still close to tied. Word 6.0 is where Microsoft finally pulled away. The 90's were exciting times. So many epic battles playing out on the covers of PC Magazine and other computing magazines of the day. Borland Delphi vs Visual Basic Word vs Wordperfect Windows vs OS/2 Lotus vs Excel Explorer vs Netscape Oracle vs SQL Server And many non-Microsoft battles. Microsoft wasn't the clear winner in most battles until the mid-90s. The current AI wars seem to be somewhat similar.
• adrian_b 2y ago
  Windows 95 was what has started the dominance of Microsoft in office suites, so in 1995 it was too early to see the results. Until Windows 95, many people were already using Windows, but never exclusively, all serious work was still done using MS-DOS programs and Windows was regarded more as a toy. This has changed with Windows 95, which was the first Windows version that you could use for doing everything you needed on the computer. The advantage of Microsoft was that the other companies were not able to keep up with it in issuing new versions of their programs for Windows. The Windows versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and Wordperfect have never been as good as their MS-DOS ancestors. To achieve this, Microsoft has not hesitated to cheat, i.e. the MS Office developers were aware of the next Windows API versions a long time before competitors, so they had much more time to update their programs and the MS Office suite also made frequent use of undocumented Windows APIs that competitors could not use, unless they discovered them by reverse engineering.
  • canucker2016 2y ago
    What are these frequently used undocumented Windows APIs that MS Office uses? This retrocomputing stackexchange answer doesn't list any - https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25955/did-microsoft-really-reserve-secret-apis-in-windows https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25955/did...
    • adrian_b 2y ago
      The answers at your link explain pretty well what kind of APIs these were and they provide sources, e.g. the several books that have been published under titles like "Undocumented Windows ...". There were no magic APIs, just ordinary functions that covered various features not yet implemented in the publicly available Win32 API. Keep in mind also that the Windows kernel system calls were never accessible directly, like in Linux or the like, but as an external developer you were at the mercy of the user libraries provided by Microsoft. If the documented user libraries did not cover all the features actually implemented by the operating system, there was no way to use them without reverse engineering. This is now pretty much ancient history and later such APIs have been documented by Microsoft, e.g. in the "Windows Protocols Specifications", mostly as a consequence of lawsuits and investigations by the European Union and FTC. However when that happened, around 2000, the damage had already been done and the competition had been eliminated. The dominance of Microsoft in office suites that has been achieved during the transition from MS-DOS to Windows 95, than Windows 98, has succeeded in good part because of the great increase in the number of computer users during this time. For newbies, the MS Office suite took very well advantage of the new features enabled by a GUI and MS Office was very easy to use, while the Windows versions of the older MS-DOS programs, like Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect were much less polished than MS Office, while simultaneously losing their previous keyboard-based user interface, which for experienced users had been much faster at accomplishing any task than any Microsoft GUI. So the MS Office GUI alternatives were neither easier to use nor faster, therefore not even their former users had any reason to stick with them, while all the newbies were naturally attracted to MS Office. Moreover, starting with Windows 95, Microsoft has convinced somehow all the hardware peripheral add-on-cards to stop documenting their products, but instead of that deliver them together with only Windows device drivers. Since that time, the non-Microsoft operating systems had to rely mostly on reverse-engineering for being able to run on modern hardware. Many years later, the situation has improved somewhat, but only for certain classes of peripherals, like network interface cards, where the vendors typically also provide Linux drivers now. This has hit also the old MS-DOS programs like Lotus 1-2-3, which had tons of drivers for various kinds of now obsolete Super-VGA video cards, so on new computers with Windows 95 or later they had to run in some less performant video mode that was supported directly or through emulation on modern graphic cards, unlike the Windows programs that could take full advantage of the hardware. This has contributed to the obsolescence of the better MS-DOS programs, because even if Windows 95 could run them in Virtual 8086 mode they did not work as well as on the older computers for which the MS-DOS programs had drivers that took advantage of enhanced features.
• canucker2016 2y ago
  Back in the day, a word processor or spreadsheet app could cost several hundred dollars each. Buying an office suite was supposed to be cheaper than if you bought the 3 apps in an office suite separately. Consistency in UX and integration between app in the office suite were other touted advantages.