MS-Power Point Innovation
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Wikipedia
Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program, created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 20, 1987, initially for Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired PowerPoint for about $14 million three months after it appeared. This was Microsoft’s first significant acquisition, and Microsoft set up a new business unit for PowerPoint in Silicon Valley where Forethought had been located.
PowerPoint became a component of the Microsoft Office suite, first offered in 1989 for Macintosh and in 1990 for Windows, which bundled several Microsoft apps. Beginning with PowerPoint 4.0 (1994), PowerPoint was integrated into Microsoft Office development, and adopted shared common components and a converged user interface.
PowerPoint’s market share was very small at first, prior to introducing a version for Microsoft Windows, but grew rapidly with the growth of Windows and of Office. Since the late 1990s, PowerPoint’s worldwide market share of presentation software has been estimated at 95 percent.
PowerPoint was originally designed to provide visuals for group presentations within business organizations, but has come to be very widely used in many other communication situations, both in business and beyond. The impact of this much wider use of PowerPoint has been experienced as a powerful change throughout society, with strong reactions including advice that it should be used less, should be used differently, or should be used better.
The first PowerPoint version (Macintosh 1987) was used to produce overhead transparencies, the second (Macintosh 1988, Windows 1990) could also produce color 35 mm slides. The third version (Windows and Macintosh 1992) introduced video output of virtual slideshows to digital projectors, which would over time completely replace physical transparencies and slides. A dozen major versions since then have added many additional features and modes of operation and have made PowerPoint available beyond Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, adding versions for iOS, Android, and web access.
PowerPoint was created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software startup in Silicon Valley named Forethought, Inc. Forethought had been founded in 1983 to create an integrated environment and applications for future personal computers that would provide a graphical user interface, but it had run into difficulties requiring a “restart” and new plan.
On July 5, 1984, Forethought hired Robert Gaskins as its vice president of product development to create a new application that would be especially suited to the new graphical personal computers, such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. Gaskins produced his initial description of PowerPoint about a month later (August 14, 1984) in the form of a 2-page document titled “Presentation Graphics for Overhead Projection.” By October 1984 Gaskins had selected Dennis Austin to be the developer for PowerPoint. Gaskins and Austin worked together on the definition and design of the new product for nearly a year, and produced the first specification document dated August 21, 1985. This first design document showed a product as it would look in Microsoft Windows 1.0, which at that time had not been released.
Development from that spec was begun by Austin in November 1985, for Macintosh first. About six months later, on May 1, 1986, Gaskins and Austin chose a second developer to join the project, Thomas Rudkin. Gaskins prepared two final product specification marketing documents in June 1986; these described a product for both Macintosh and Windows. At about the same time, Austin, Rudkin, and Gaskins produced a second and final major design specification document, this time showing a Macintosh look.
Throughout this development period, the product was called “Presenter.” Then, just before release, there was a last-minute check with Forethought’s lawyers to register the name as a trademark, and “Presenter” was unexpectedly rejected because it had already been used by someone else. Gaskins says that he thought of “PowerPoint”, based on the product’s goal of “empowering” individual presenters, and sent that name to the lawyers for clearance, while all the documentation was hastily revised.
Funding to complete development of PowerPoint was assured in mid-January, 1987, when a new Apple Computer venture capital fund, called Apple’s Strategic Investment Group, selected PowerPoint to be its first investment. A month later, on February 22, 1987, Forethought announced PowerPoint at the Personal Computer Forum in Phoenix; John Sculley, the CEO of Apple, appeared at the announcement and said “We see desktop presentation as potentially a bigger market for Apple than desktop publishing.”
PowerPoint 1.0 for Macintosh shipped from manufacturing on April 20, 1987, and the first production run of 10,000 units was sold out.
By early 1987, Microsoft was starting to plan a new application to create presentations, an activity led by Jeff Raikes, who was head of marketing for the Applications Division. Microsoft assigned an internal group to write a specification and plan for a new presentation product. They contemplated an acquisition to speed up development, and in early 1987 Microsoft sent a letter of intent to acquire Dave Winer’s product called MORE, an outlining program that could print its outlines as bullet charts. During this preparatory activity Raikes discovered that a program specifically to make overhead presentations was already being developed by Forethought, Inc., and that it was nearly completed. Raikes and others visited Forethought on February 6, 1987, for a confidential demonstration.
Raikes later recounted his reaction to seeing PowerPoint and his report about it to Bill Gates, who was initially skeptical:
I thought, “software to do overheads—that’s a great idea.” I came back to see Bill. I said, “Bill, I think we really ought to do this;” and Bill said, “No, no, no, no, no, that’s just a feature of Microsoft Word, just put it into Word.” … And I kept saying, “Bill, no, it’s not just a feature of Microsoft Word, it’s a whole genre of how people do these presentations.” And, to his credit, he listened to me and ultimately allowed me to go forward and … buy this company in Silicon Valley called Forethought, for the product known as PowerPoint.
When PowerPoint was released by Forethought, its initial press was favorable; the Wall Street Journal reported on early reactions: “‘I see about one product a year I get this excited about,’ says Amy Wohl, a consultant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. ‘People will buy a Macintosh just to get access to this product.'”
On April 28, 1987, a week after shipment, a group of Microsoft’s senior executives spent another day at Forethought to hear about initial PowerPoint sales on Macintosh and plans for Windows. The following day, Microsoft sent a letter to Dave Winer withdrawing its earlier letter of intent to acquire his company, and in mid-May 1987 Microsoft sent a letter of intent to acquire Forethought. As requested in that letter of intent, Robert Gaskins from Forethought went to Redmond for a one-on-one meeting with Bill Gates in early June, 1987, and by the end of July an agreement was concluded for an acquisition. The New York Times reported:
… July 30 1987— The Microsoft Corporation announced its first significant software acquisition today, paying $14 million [$33.4 million in present-day terms] for Forethought Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. Forethought makes a program called PowerPoint that allows users of Apple Macintosh computers to make overhead transparencies or flip charts. … [T]he acquisition of Forethought is the first significant one for Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash. Forethought would remain in Sunnyvale, giving Microsoft a Silicon Valley presence. The unit will be headed by Robert Gaskins, Forethought’s vice president of product development.
Microsoft’s president Jon Shirley offered Microsoft’s motivation for the acquisition: “‘We made this deal primarily because of our belief in desktop presentations as a product category. … Forethought was first to market with a product in this category.'”
Microsoft set up within its Applications Division an independent “Graphics Business Unit” to develop and market PowerPoint, the first Microsoft application group distant from the main Redmond location. All the PowerPoint people from Forethought joined Microsoft, and the new location was headed by Robert Gaskins, with Dennis Austin and Thomas Rudkin leading development. PowerPoint 1.0 for Macintosh was modified to indicate the new Microsoft ownership and continued to be sold.
A new PowerPoint 2.0 for Macintosh, adding color 35 mm slides, appeared by mid-1988, and again received good reviews. The same PowerPoint 2.0 product re-developed for Windows was shipped two years later, in mid-1990, at the same time as Windows 3.0. Much of the color technology was the fruit of a joint development partnership with Genigraphics, at that time the dominant presentation services company.
PowerPoint 3.0, which was shipped in 1992 for both Windows and Mac, added live video for projectors and monitors, with the result that PowerPoint was thereafter used for delivering presentations as well as for preparing them. This was at first an alternative to overhead transparencies and 35 mm slides, but over time would come to replace them.