On 6 Oct 2006 at 4:08, dhbailey wrote: > Pure economic strong-arm tactics forced Office onto millions of > computers that otherwise the owners would have had to look at the > actual features and capabilities of various competing word processors, > database managers, spreadsheets.
Look at the world of software in 1993, when the first version of Office was created. It offered: 1. Word 6 2. Excel 5 3. PowerPoint something-or-other Now, what were the alternatives? For Word, the competition was WordPerfect, but in 1993, WP had not yet ported to Windows (or maybe the awful WPWin 5.2 was out already -- I can't remember). There was nothing comparable to Excel 5 in the other spreadsheets. Lotus didn't have it, and Quattro Pro wasn't there yet (in DOS or Windows versions). There was *no* competition for PowerPoint -- the bundling with Office created the category of presentation software. So, when you say: > You seem to be thinking that Office has such a huge market penetration > because it actually offers the users what they want. I don't think > that's the case. ...I think that you are wrong. Now, I left out databases, because in 1993, only Paradox for Windows existed (except for a few short-lived Windows RDBMs that had very little visibility or market penetration), and it was creating a new paradigm that few people understood yet (in its programmability), and Paradox lost a lot of its developers because they chucked their old programming language in favor of a new one (it was necessary because of the switch from a sequential to an event-driven UI). Sometime around that point Borland also came out with dBase for Windows, but it was never very good. Microsoft came out in 1992 or 93 with Access 1, then 1.1 (which should have been Access 2), but it still wasn't very good, and wasn't bundled with Office at that time. Then in 1994, MS created Access 2.0, and all bets were off. This was superior to all competitors on Windows, partly because Microsoft had purchased FoxPro and incorporated FoxPro's "Rushmore" technology into Access. This made Access significantly faster than either dBase or Paradox. By 1994, Microsoft had an Office suite with these programs to offer: Word 6 Excel 5 PowerPoint Access 2.0 For Powerpoint, there was still virtually no direct competion (there was Lotus's program, whose name I've forgotten, but it didn't do everything that PowerPoint did, so was not a direct comparison). WordPerfect had come out with a usable Windows version by then, but WP had no partners yet to bundle their software with (that came later). Lotus was being purchased by IBM, so their Ami Pro was basically on the way out already (even though it was a very good word processor). Excel 5 was still the best spreadsheet, bar none, even though the first release of Quattro Pro for Windows was quite good (it still had the old DOS spreadsheet orientation for its printing, something that Excel had never done because it built Windows printing conventions into it from the beginning). Access had competition from Paradox and dBase, but had superior programmability, ease of use and performance. So, Microsoft didn't do it just on strong arming the OEMs. That was part of it, yes, but they also had a line of products that was a *very* good value. I can remember my first recommendation to purchase the Office Suite. The cost of the suite then was around $600, but that was the same price as purchasing Word and Excel separately -- yes, standalone applications cost $300 then. Lotus and WordPerfect and Borland had to come up with Office bundles to compete. Lotus's suite had: Lotus for Windows spreadsheet Ami Pro word processor Approach database Presentation program whose name I've forgotten WordPerfect/Borland teamed up to offer: WordPerfect Quattro Pro spreadsheet Paradox database And I don't remember that they had a competitor for PowerPoint. While one could do decently with any of these suites, and while after a certain point, Windows UIs were so standardized that one could move between all of the competitors fluidly and still do basic work, the non-MS competition was not good enough to beat the installed-out-of- the-box MS Office suite. Microsoft's offerings may not have been best-of-breed for all environments (legal word processing is one area where Word was never as good as WP), their products were still near the top in terms of features, performance and ease of use. Absent the OEM pressure, would MS have killed off all the competition? Probably not. Would it still have had the biggest market share in all the software categories? Probably. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
