For all of you who hate MSFT go back 10 yrs...
Just a history refresher for those who's PC experience doesn't quite reach back a decade.
In the PC world, dBASE, Lotus, and WordPerfect ruled. Many office PCs had all three packages, and 'conversion' utilities gathered little dust as people struggled with their incompatibilities. Cost, always a big factor, was quite high as each of these packages came with a stiff pricetag. At the time, Microsoft's Word was a close second to word perfect, MultiPlan, if anyone can remember this spreadsheet which pre-dated Excel, trailed Lotus by quite a distance, and the database area was overlooked, at least until they bought FoxBase. Windows lacked the beauty and functionality first delivered in version 3.0, released in May 1990.
The big change, as I see it, was Microsoft's decision to bundle the commonly purchased packages together and sell the 'suite' for much less than the price of the individual components. The customer paid equivalent, or less, for what was needed, and took the 'extras' at no cost. This propelled Office to great market penetration. The 'network effect' worked its magic and soon Office was the package most likely to be found on PCs and, therefor, most likely to be familiar to most users. New users naturally wanted to learn software 'in demand' so that their efforts would return the most utility and employability.
Microsoft, to its credit, didn't just sit back and let the money roll in: They kept improving their products. Today, we enjoy a computing environment where all our software has a similar look and feel, flattening the learning curve, and shrinking the purchase price. Developers have a consistent API environment, and gone are the days of searching through shelves of software in computer stores looking, not for what you need, but for what will run on your machine.
We, the computer users, have much to be grateful to Microsoft for, but we, the Microsoft shareholders, have even greater reasons celebrating.
Cheerios, PW. |
