History Uncut: Bill Gates unveils Microsoft Excel (1987)

http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unveils-microsoft-excel-1987

by robot • 14 years ago

62 67 14 years ago

history.com

iscrewyou• 14 years ago

Correct link: http://www.history.com/videos/history-uncut-bill-gates-unvei...

rms2• 14 years ago

Excel, still Microsoft's best product?

pinaceae2• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

snogglethorpe3• 14 years ago

Visicalc was first, but I think it was Lotus 123 that really made spreadsheets popular; it was absolutely huge back in the day.

eckyptang13• 14 years 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.

morsch• 14 years 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.

mogrim2• 14 years ago

That, and Word. Still light years ahead of the competition.

seanmcdirmid2• 14 years 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.

jetti2• 14 years 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!

podperson4• 14 years ago

I prefer Pages to Word, and my requirements are far more extreme than most people's. Pages even seamlessly handles Word's change tracking (i.e. you can load a Word doc with change tracking going, make changes, and they will flow back to Word or to other Pages users seamlessly). All this and Pages doesn't waste gobs of screen real estate on "ribbons" and other useless crap.

Word obviously supports Microsoft automation stuff that's unique to its own ecosystem, but aside from that and index generation, Pages is actually ahead of Word. (Not "light years", but heck it's a word-processor.)

moondowner• 14 years 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.

omh2• 14 years 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.

eckyptang13• 14 years 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)

adestefan• 14 years 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• 14 years ago

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

dm8• 14 years 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).

omh2• 14 years 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)

agumonkey• 14 years ago

Symphony project is terminated, I think they gave some of it to Apache but I can't find the source anymore.

nhebb2• 14 years 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.htm...

eckyptang13• 14 years 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• 14 years 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.

dmethvin• 14 years ago

At least some of their hesitation was because they were selling very expensive systems like Displaywriter and DataMaster [1] to word-intensive corporations and didn't want to cannibalize that revenue. For example, most big law firms still had typing pools in the mid-1980s and those were driven by Wang and IBM word processors, not PCs.

The office suite concept was still a hard sell in the late 1980s and early 1990s; most were seen as a mediocre collection with a star product. Before Windows, people were much less concerned about a common UI and more interested in getting the best-of-breed (or at least the market favorite) in each category. So that led to Lotus 1-2-3 for spreadsheet, Wordperfect for word processing, Harvard Business for presentations, and DBase for databases. None of those came from the same company!

IBM had products in several of these categories but they were not market leaders. By the time IBM got serious about an office suite, there were already three strong options available (Microsoft, Borland/Lotus, and WordPerfect). Then Windows 95/Office 95 hit and it was all over.

[1] http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_8.html

pge3• 14 years 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.

pbhjpbhj5• 14 years ago

I'm always interested in this - what are the specific features that LibreOffice Calc and the like lack that you use?

pge3• 14 years ago

(1)compatibility at a formula and function level for some of the excel functions (eg. matrix functions). (2) VB macros

schneby• 14 years ago

Anyone else notice the Warren Buffett cameo at :14?

History Uncut: Bill Gates unveils Microsoft Excel (1987)

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