8 ms·

History Uncut: Bill Gates unveils Microsoft Excel (1987)

62 points by robot 14y ago

iscrewyou 14y ago
Correct link: http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987??cmpid=PaidMedia_Taboola_Video_HIST_TOPICVIDEO#history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987 http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unvei...
rms 14y ago
Excel, still Microsoft's best product?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- pinaceae 14y ago
  undoubtedly. of course it came after visicalc, but by now it is not hyperbole to say that a large part of the world economy runs through excel spreadsheets. and it is really hard to displace. the optimisations in that tool are amazing, you don't realize it's performance until you try the alternatives. some argue it is the OS of finance. definitely shares its spot with SAP FI/CO. a controller will give up any tool before letting go of MS Excel. it is the number one reason of companies being reluctant to using iPads. how will i edit my spreadsheets? what about macros? i need this to capture expenses, forecasts, etc. if MS releases MS Office/Excel for iOS, Surface is dead.
  - chalst 14y ago
    Quantrix is used a great deal in finance, and I have the impression that it is used more than Excel by people who need to have confidence that their financial models are correct.
    - pinaceae 14y ago
      I wasn't precise enough, I meant financial departments within companies of all areas. Finance as in banking of course has its special tools - but I would be surprised if Excel is not used for anything quick and dirty. MS Excel is not precise enough in a lot of areas, you can't compare it to something like SPSS for statistics for example - but it's good enough.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Visicalc was first, but I think it was Lotus 123 that really made spreadsheets popular; it was absolutely huge back in the day.
    - lancewiggs 14y ago
      Yes. Excel took a long time to topple Lotus 123, but Lotus's failure to move to a GUI quickly enough saw Excel win. DOS Microsoft Word was before Excel I think.
      - jahewson 14y ago
        It was a similar story with Word Perfect, their failure to move to a GUI basically handed MS Word market dominance. Their belated port of the DOS UI was very awkward at first, and the move to 32-bit in 95 was the final straw.
      - arethuza 14y ago
        The "original" Word, before Windows, was available for DOS and Xenix - I actually saw some systems using Word on Xenix in '88.
        snogglethorpe 14y ago
        I've actually used MS Word on Windows 1.0 (around 1985ish I think). It was .... well, basically unusably horrible. As you typed, it would swap stuff in/out from floppy disk; as you might imagine, this made even just entering text an excruciating experience. Luckily for MS, systems eventually got more memory and hard disks...
        arethuza 14y ago
        The time I saw MS Word deployed on a Xenix box it didn't work terribly well - was fine on the system console but was barely usable on serial terminals as the make of terminals (Wyse something or other) had Alt keys which did nothing. And, as far as I recall, the Alt key was pretty important in Word. Of course, this wasn't Microsoft's fault - rather the idiotic salesman who had sold all of this without checking with anyone whether it would work or not.
  - eckyptang 14y ago
    Lets reverse your last point: when MS releases Office for Surface, iOS is dead in business. If they hit that mythical $199 price point which is rumored (unlikely) and it ships with Office RT, then there is no better tablet proposition out there.
    - Jabbles 14y ago
      I don't think MS needs to lower the price that much for businesses, given that a full licence of Office probably costs about that. Checks website, oh it's $499 for 1 user, 2PCs (obviously bulk discounts will be massive, but still).
      - eckyptang 14y ago
        No it's $199.99 for one user one pc or for two PCs, one user $279.99: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-business/ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-business/ (It's $499 if you want access and publisher but most people don't)
        pbhjpbhj 14y ago
        USD $199 is currently about GBP £122. We have VAT added at 20%, which makes the cost almost £150. GBP price is £190 (1 install, 2 is £240). Guess this is when you get a VPN. I'm interested how exhaustion of rights works in these situations can one of you [hypothetically] purchase the download for me and resell it to me in the UK? If you transfer it first to your UK server then presumably there would be no import duty or VAT to pay as it's a personal transaction?
        eckyptang 14y ago
        You can just buy an OEM copy here. It's cheaper. Just buy a USB stick with it for £1 and you get it for £159 without all the hassle.
      - protomyth 14y ago
        Office is significantly lower than $499 or even $199 for PC's under their normal business licensing arrangements. Less than $50 for most larger businesses.
  - morsch 14y ago
    For most of those people, it's simply the only software they're moderately competent with. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wonder how much Excel has ended up shaping our world because of the point of view it implies.
    - snogglethorpe 14y ago
      Yup... I used to have a boss who was a linguist by trade, who used Excel as his general-purpose programming language of choice, simply because it's what he knew the best. He was pretty good at it, so the stuff generally more or less worked fine, but it was a constant source of amusement for everybody else...
- mogrim 14y ago
  That, and Word. Still light years ahead of the competition.
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    After all these years and Word still can't kern worth a darn. Would love to throw away LaTeX for something easier to use, but Word is not it. Excel is special if you need it, PowerPoint is almost as good as Keynote now. Visio seems like it hasn't been updated in 10 years; OmniGraffle is so much better.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      Different strokes for different folks. Visio is the one piece of software I miss from Windows. I hate OmniGraffle as its boolean operations are pathetic and it seems to think it knows where to put stuff instead of where you put it. Visio also has so many more shapes.
      - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
        Using Visio is like stepping back to 1999. They could have at least updated the renderer, added better magnets and auto positioning... It's bizarre looking at a old-style renderer bolted onto a metroish UI in 2013. What are their designers thinking? Visio was the best diagramming tool in 1999, it's still popular in the enterprise, biz types love it; omnigraffle is more for designers, engineers who use macs, different markets to be sure.
    - eckyptang 14y ago
      The content is more important than the presentation for most users. Visio is a piece of shit I will say.
  - jetti 14y ago
    For anything other than typing up a paper, I hate Word. It is awful with graphics and formatting is a pain in the ass. When it comes to working with images and text in Word, I almost feel like it would be easier (and less of a hassle) to hand code it in HTML with CSS and then print that instead of doing it in Word. The last few months have been torturous because my fiance and I have been using Word to create our wedding invitations. If that is light years ahead of the competition, I seriously think I need to write a word processor and profit!
- moondowner 14y ago
  According to me the one product that is best from Microsoft is Exchange. For example there are a lot of organizations that are shifting to Linux and OpenSource (LibreOffice and similar), but Exchange is the one software that cannot be replaced.
- omh 14y ago
  The entire Office suite is a good product with few realistic competitors. For all the criticisms, it does exactly what many businesses need. And the de-facto requirement for good Office compatibility keeps businesses on Windows.
  - eckyptang 14y ago
    Let's also add that it's very cheap for what it is. Office 2010 Home and Business 2010 (Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint) is £159GBP inc tax. It has a usable life of ~5 years. That's £2.65GBP/month (about the same as two loaves of reasonable quality bread a month)
    - heyitsnick 14y ago
      > That's £2.65GBP/month (about the same as two loaves of reasonable quality bread a month) Reminds me of one of my favorite analogies from a TV news report: "And the new widget weighs in at just 2kg; that's about the same as 2 1kg bags of flour"
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      http://www7.buyoffice.microsoft.com/emea1/basket.aspx?cache=87044232&culture=en-GB http://www7.buyoffice.microsoft.com/emea1/basket.aspx?cache=... says it's £190 (presumably inc VAT). Reading the info about installs strongly suggests that unless you bought a PC with a preload then you have to buy the "2 install" version at £240 (but it's pretty opaque). Bread is a very poor comparison as the margin per unit decreases at a far lower rate than that for non-material goods. I'm sure MS would argue they're only licensing use to you too - perhaps "it's not much more than a TV license" would be better?
      - eckyptang 14y ago
        OEM. Only fools buy retail. Buy it with a £1 USB stick and it's fine: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/microsoft-office-home-and-business-2010-english-word-outlook-onenote-powerpoint-excel-key-only http://www.scan.co.uk/products/microsoft-office-home-and-bus... Everything is licensed. Even bread. You have to give it back one day via the toilet or the grave.
- adestefan 14y ago
  On the client side Excel is probably the best they've put out. Overall, I think that ActiveDirectory and the integration they achieved in Windows Server 2000 with the Windows 2000 desktop could be the best thing that Microsoft has ever produced.
tisme 14y ago
http://spreadsheet-day.com/blog/spreadsheet-history/visicalc/ http://spreadsheet-day.com/blog/spreadsheet-history/visicalc...
dm8 14y ago
Was this their first product in office suite? Out of curiosity, why didn't IBM ever release office suite? They had such a strong hold on enterprise market and yet all they did was to buy lotus notes that too in mid nineties (quite late).
- omh 14y ago
  I'm a little young to know for sure, but did IBM make any significant software (other than the OS) before the purchase of Lotus? At the time when Excel was announced they were still running OS/2 as a joint venture with Microsoft. (Incidentally, IBM does now have an office suite. A quite nice version of OpenOffice: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home)
  - agumonkey 14y ago
    Symphony project is terminated, I think they gave some of it to Apache but I can't find the source anymore.
  - nhebb 14y ago
    They made DB2 in the early 80's. DB2 has always seemed like the quiet giant in the database world. They even have a free Express edition [1], but I never hear anyone talking about it. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.html?S_TACT=wikien&S_CMP=ecddww01 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.htm...
- eckyptang 14y ago
  "Office" i.e. the compilation of products started in 1989 with Office for Windows (I still have the floppy disks here). Word was actually first (in 1983). Excel came in on the Mac (!) first in 1985 and then Windows in 1987. The had a spreadsheet (MultiPlan) which arrived before that on DOS but it was rubbish and didn't make a dent in 1-2-3. Microsoft had a very complicated history in the 1980s and 1990s.
- twoodfin 14y ago
  Via Lotus, IBM did release an office suite. I had a version for OS/2. Ami Pro was actually an excellent word processor for its day. The layout features were vastly superior to the Word of the day IIRC.
pge 14y ago
With all the talk about linux desktops recently, I think one of reasons for lack of adoption is right here. In the business world, excel reigns supreme, and there isn't a viable linux equivalent. Give me excel for linux and I could be rid of windows for good.
- pbhjpbhj 14y ago
  I'm always interested in this - what are the specific features that LibreOffice Calc and the like lack that you use?
  - pge 14y ago
    (1)compatibility at a formula and function level for some of the excel functions (eg. matrix functions). (2) VB macros
    - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
      It sounds like your definition of "viable" differs from mine then. LibreOffice Calc does "matrix formulae" and whilst it doesn't do VB macros you can write macros in some common scripts/languages including javascript and python (see eg http://webodf.org/blog/2012-04-13.html http://webodf.org/blog/2012-04-13.html). It's certainly not a drop in replacement and certainly not right for everyone but one often hears "we couldn't use $x" when in fact what is meant is there is no impetus to use a replacement and that the users don't want to adapt entrenched behaviours. That's fine but is quite different as an objection to "the software can't do what we need".
      - pge 14y ago
        that's fair - Calc can do everything you need, so the objection is more clearly stated as it not being compatible with excel. You can't share files with excel users (like you can with Word and AbiWord or Writer).
schneby 14y ago
Anyone else notice the Warren Buffett cameo at :14?

62 points by robot 14y ago

Correct link: http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987??cmpid=PaidMedia_Taboola_Video_HIST_TOPICVIDEO#history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987 http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unvei...

rms 14y ago

Excel, still Microsoft's best product?

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pinaceae 14y ago
undoubtedly. of course it came after visicalc, but by now it is not hyperbole to say that a large part of the world economy runs through excel spreadsheets. and it is really hard to displace. the optimisations in that tool are amazing, you don't realize it's performance until you try the alternatives. some argue it is the OS of finance. definitely shares its spot with SAP FI/CO. a controller will give up any tool before letting go of MS Excel. it is the number one reason of companies being reluctant to using iPads. how will i edit my spreadsheets? what about macros? i need this to capture expenses, forecasts, etc. if MS releases MS Office/Excel for iOS, Surface is dead.
- chalst 14y ago
  Quantrix is used a great deal in finance, and I have the impression that it is used more than Excel by people who need to have confidence that their financial models are correct.
  - pinaceae 14y ago
    I wasn't precise enough, I meant financial departments within companies of all areas. Finance as in banking of course has its special tools - but I would be surprised if Excel is not used for anything quick and dirty. MS Excel is not precise enough in a lot of areas, you can't compare it to something like SPSS for statistics for example - but it's good enough.
- snogglethorpe 14y ago
  Visicalc was first, but I think it was Lotus 123 that really made spreadsheets popular; it was absolutely huge back in the day.
  - lancewiggs 14y ago
    Yes. Excel took a long time to topple Lotus 123, but Lotus's failure to move to a GUI quickly enough saw Excel win. DOS Microsoft Word was before Excel I think.
    - jahewson 14y ago
      It was a similar story with Word Perfect, their failure to move to a GUI basically handed MS Word market dominance. Their belated port of the DOS UI was very awkward at first, and the move to 32-bit in 95 was the final straw.
    - arethuza 14y ago
      The "original" Word, before Windows, was available for DOS and Xenix - I actually saw some systems using Word on Xenix in '88.
      - snogglethorpe 14y ago
        I've actually used MS Word on Windows 1.0 (around 1985ish I think). It was .... well, basically unusably horrible. As you typed, it would swap stuff in/out from floppy disk; as you might imagine, this made even just entering text an excruciating experience. Luckily for MS, systems eventually got more memory and hard disks...
        arethuza 14y ago
        The time I saw MS Word deployed on a Xenix box it didn't work terribly well - was fine on the system console but was barely usable on serial terminals as the make of terminals (Wyse something or other) had Alt keys which did nothing. And, as far as I recall, the Alt key was pretty important in Word. Of course, this wasn't Microsoft's fault - rather the idiotic salesman who had sold all of this without checking with anyone whether it would work or not.
- eckyptang 14y ago
  Lets reverse your last point: when MS releases Office for Surface, iOS is dead in business. If they hit that mythical $199 price point which is rumored (unlikely) and it ships with Office RT, then there is no better tablet proposition out there.
  - Jabbles 14y ago
    I don't think MS needs to lower the price that much for businesses, given that a full licence of Office probably costs about that. Checks website, oh it's $499 for 1 user, 2PCs (obviously bulk discounts will be massive, but still).
    - eckyptang 14y ago
      No it's $199.99 for one user one pc or for two PCs, one user $279.99: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-business/ http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-business/ (It's $499 if you want access and publisher but most people don't)
      - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
        USD $199 is currently about GBP £122. We have VAT added at 20%, which makes the cost almost £150. GBP price is £190 (1 install, 2 is £240). Guess this is when you get a VPN. I'm interested how exhaustion of rights works in these situations can one of you [hypothetically] purchase the download for me and resell it to me in the UK? If you transfer it first to your UK server then presumably there would be no import duty or VAT to pay as it's a personal transaction?
        eckyptang 14y ago
        You can just buy an OEM copy here. It's cheaper. Just buy a USB stick with it for £1 and you get it for £159 without all the hassle.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      Office is significantly lower than $499 or even $199 for PC's under their normal business licensing arrangements. Less than $50 for most larger businesses.
- morsch 14y ago
  For most of those people, it's simply the only software they're moderately competent with. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wonder how much Excel has ended up shaping our world because of the point of view it implies.
  - snogglethorpe 14y ago
    Yup... I used to have a boss who was a linguist by trade, who used Excel as his general-purpose programming language of choice, simply because it's what he knew the best. He was pretty good at it, so the stuff generally more or less worked fine, but it was a constant source of amusement for everybody else...
mogrim 14y ago
That, and Word. Still light years ahead of the competition.
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  After all these years and Word still can't kern worth a darn. Would love to throw away LaTeX for something easier to use, but Word is not it. Excel is special if you need it, PowerPoint is almost as good as Keynote now. Visio seems like it hasn't been updated in 10 years; OmniGraffle is so much better.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    Different strokes for different folks. Visio is the one piece of software I miss from Windows. I hate OmniGraffle as its boolean operations are pathetic and it seems to think it knows where to put stuff instead of where you put it. Visio also has so many more shapes.
    - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
      Using Visio is like stepping back to 1999. They could have at least updated the renderer, added better magnets and auto positioning... It's bizarre looking at a old-style renderer bolted onto a metroish UI in 2013. What are their designers thinking? Visio was the best diagramming tool in 1999, it's still popular in the enterprise, biz types love it; omnigraffle is more for designers, engineers who use macs, different markets to be sure.
  - eckyptang 14y ago
    The content is more important than the presentation for most users. Visio is a piece of shit I will say.
- jetti 14y ago
  For anything other than typing up a paper, I hate Word. It is awful with graphics and formatting is a pain in the ass. When it comes to working with images and text in Word, I almost feel like it would be easier (and less of a hassle) to hand code it in HTML with CSS and then print that instead of doing it in Word. The last few months have been torturous because my fiance and I have been using Word to create our wedding invitations. If that is light years ahead of the competition, I seriously think I need to write a word processor and profit!
moondowner 14y ago
According to me the one product that is best from Microsoft is Exchange. For example there are a lot of organizations that are shifting to Linux and OpenSource (LibreOffice and similar), but Exchange is the one software that cannot be replaced.
omh 14y ago
The entire Office suite is a good product with few realistic competitors. For all the criticisms, it does exactly what many businesses need. And the de-facto requirement for good Office compatibility keeps businesses on Windows.
- eckyptang 14y ago
  Let's also add that it's very cheap for what it is. Office 2010 Home and Business 2010 (Outlook, Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint) is £159GBP inc tax. It has a usable life of ~5 years. That's £2.65GBP/month (about the same as two loaves of reasonable quality bread a month)
  - heyitsnick 14y ago
    > That's £2.65GBP/month (about the same as two loaves of reasonable quality bread a month) Reminds me of one of my favorite analogies from a TV news report: "And the new widget weighs in at just 2kg; that's about the same as 2 1kg bags of flour"
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    http://www7.buyoffice.microsoft.com/emea1/basket.aspx?cache=87044232&culture=en-GB http://www7.buyoffice.microsoft.com/emea1/basket.aspx?cache=... says it's £190 (presumably inc VAT). Reading the info about installs strongly suggests that unless you bought a PC with a preload then you have to buy the "2 install" version at £240 (but it's pretty opaque). Bread is a very poor comparison as the margin per unit decreases at a far lower rate than that for non-material goods. I'm sure MS would argue they're only licensing use to you too - perhaps "it's not much more than a TV license" would be better?
    - eckyptang 14y ago
      OEM. Only fools buy retail. Buy it with a £1 USB stick and it's fine: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/microsoft-office-home-and-business-2010-english-word-outlook-onenote-powerpoint-excel-key-only http://www.scan.co.uk/products/microsoft-office-home-and-bus... Everything is licensed. Even bread. You have to give it back one day via the toilet or the grave.
adestefan 14y ago
On the client side Excel is probably the best they've put out. Overall, I think that ActiveDirectory and the integration they achieved in Windows Server 2000 with the Windows 2000 desktop could be the best thing that Microsoft has ever produced.

tisme 14y ago

http://spreadsheet-day.com/blog/spreadsheet-history/visicalc/ http://spreadsheet-day.com/blog/spreadsheet-history/visicalc...

dm8 14y ago

Was this their first product in office suite? Out of curiosity, why didn't IBM ever release office suite? They had such a strong hold on enterprise market and yet all they did was to buy lotus notes that too in mid nineties (quite late).

omh 14y ago
I'm a little young to know for sure, but did IBM make any significant software (other than the OS) before the purchase of Lotus? At the time when Excel was announced they were still running OS/2 as a joint venture with Microsoft. (Incidentally, IBM does now have an office suite. A quite nice version of OpenOffice: http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home http://www-03.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.nsf/home)
- agumonkey 14y ago
  Symphony project is terminated, I think they gave some of it to Apache but I can't find the source anymore.
- nhebb 14y ago
  They made DB2 in the early 80's. DB2 has always seemed like the quiet giant in the database world. They even have a free Express edition [1], but I never hear anyone talking about it. http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.html?S_TACT=wikien&S_CMP=ecddww01 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/download.htm...
eckyptang 14y ago
"Office" i.e. the compilation of products started in 1989 with Office for Windows (I still have the floppy disks here). Word was actually first (in 1983). Excel came in on the Mac (!) first in 1985 and then Windows in 1987. The had a spreadsheet (MultiPlan) which arrived before that on DOS but it was rubbish and didn't make a dent in 1-2-3. Microsoft had a very complicated history in the 1980s and 1990s.
twoodfin 14y ago
Via Lotus, IBM did release an office suite. I had a version for OS/2. Ami Pro was actually an excellent word processor for its day. The layout features were vastly superior to the Word of the day IIRC.

pge 14y ago

With all the talk about linux desktops recently, I think one of reasons for lack of adoption is right here. In the business world, excel reigns supreme, and there isn't a viable linux equivalent. Give me excel for linux and I could be rid of windows for good.

pbhjpbhj 14y ago
I'm always interested in this - what are the specific features that LibreOffice Calc and the like lack that you use?
- pge 14y ago
  (1)compatibility at a formula and function level for some of the excel functions (eg. matrix functions). (2) VB macros
  - pbhjpbhj 14y ago
    It sounds like your definition of "viable" differs from mine then. LibreOffice Calc does "matrix formulae" and whilst it doesn't do VB macros you can write macros in some common scripts/languages including javascript and python (see eg http://webodf.org/blog/2012-04-13.html http://webodf.org/blog/2012-04-13.html). It's certainly not a drop in replacement and certainly not right for everyone but one often hears "we couldn't use $x" when in fact what is meant is there is no impetus to use a replacement and that the users don't want to adapt entrenched behaviours. That's fine but is quite different as an objection to "the software can't do what we need".
    - pge 14y ago
      that's fair - Calc can do everything you need, so the objection is more clearly stated as it not being compatible with excel. You can't share files with excel users (like you can with Word and AbiWord or Writer).

schneby 14y ago

Anyone else notice the Warren Buffett cameo at :14?