A brief history of "Office Suites" versus integrated apps

MS Office was something new when it was launched.

Before MS Office, the market-leading apps in each sector tended to be from different vendors. E.g. in the late MS-DOS era, the leading apps were:

• Spreadsheet: Lotus 1–2–3


• Word processor: WordPerfect


• Database: Ashton-Tate dBase IV


• Presentation program: Harvard Graphics

The shift to Windows allows MS to get the upper hand and have competitive apps in all these sectors. To understand this you must understand that the plan was that MS-DOS would be replaced by OS/2, co-written by Microsoft with IBM. Big vendors such as Lotus and WordPerfect put a lot of effort into new OS/2 versions.

But OS/2 flopped, because at IBM’s insistence, OS/2 1.x ran on the 16-bit 80286 CPU. The 286 could not effectively multitask DOS apps, and as a result, neither could OS/2 1.x — or even offer very good DOS compatibility. This needed the 32-bit 80386 CPU — the origin of the name “x86”.

When OS/2 1.x flopped, Microsoft made a last-ditch effort to revive its failed Windows product on top of DOS. Windows 3 was a surprise hit. MS was not expecting it — when Windows 3 came out, the only major app Microsoft offered for its own GUI was Excel, which had been ported from the Mac to Windows 2. 

But MS pivoted quickly, hastily wrote a wordprocessor for Windows — Word for Windows 1 — and ported its Mac presentation program Powerpoint to Windows.

( Read more... )