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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Your ordering is kind of wonky.

MS-DOS was before MS Word and Excel. It took a long time for Word or Excel to really gain ground against the market leaders, and arguably they weren't really dominant forces until they were packaged together as Office in the 90s.

Windows NT may have started development in the late 80s but it certainly wasn't released until the 90s and took a while to find success.

You also miss out on the main reason Microsoft was able to become a dominant force in so many fields; MS-DOS. DOS was the PC operating system from the 80s into the 90s, until Windows 95 finally took over, and gave Microsoft the money and position to do whatever it wanted.

None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows.

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>None of the rest of its software suite would have become dominant without being built on top of DOS and later Windows.

Way back in my angrier days when I would have spelled Microsoft as Micro$oft The Evil Empire, I would have totally agreed with you.

I've since revised my opinion. The reason is counterexamples of other wildly software that didn't need operating systems to be successful like Intuit Quicken, Photoshop, Duke Nukem games, etc. If others can sell millions of copies without an os to run on MS-DOS, Microsoft itself can too. Also MS-DOS & Windows dominance doesn't guarantee success because MS Money lost to Intuit's Quicken.

For example, with MS Word, was it successful because of Windows or was it better than WordPerfect? Sure, Windows is a part of it but MS Word was actually easier to use and crashed less often the WordPerfect-for-Windows. Wordperfect-DOS wasn't WYSIWIG. Wordperfect-DOS required memorization of function keys F01 to F12 to bold and italicize. MS Word early versions[1] had obvious buttons for bold and italics.

Now that Microsoft is weakened by iPhone/Android and Amazon AWS, I think I'm able to look back at MS in a more detached perspective. I now think they did amazing work in the 1980s and 1990s which got later overshadowed by the ugly "browser wars" and antitrust lawsuit.

[1] https://tmft.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/krnl386_004.png

A big part of why Office gained ground was that it was offered cheaper than its competitors. A big part of why they could do that was it was subsidized by DOS and Windows licenses. Then there are enterprise customers who got bundling discounts for getting Office software as well as operating system software from Microsoft.

I'm not saying that the Office products were bad, nobody was going to buy software that totally didn't work, and I'm not trying to argue the relative merits of Wordstar or WordPerfect or Lotus 123 or whatever, but if you don't think the "home field advantage" of DOS and Windows is a big part of the success of Office, then I think you're in denial.

>A big part of why Office gained ground was that it was offered cheaper than its competitors.

I remember that MS kicked off an office suite price war and that Borland and Lotus matched the low prices with their suites. MS Office still outsold Borland and Lotus when prices were the same. Borland Quattro & Approach and Lotus Ami Pro word processors were not enough of a differentiator.

MS Word and Excel were also the biggest sellers on Apple Mac and obviously, there was no Windows os there.

> MS Word early versions[1] had obvious buttons for bold and italics.

For laypeople, that may be fine. MS Word was atrociously bad for high-volume typing. Had family in transcription, and they could fly with WordPerfect, doing > 100 WPM. This was a combination of having external tools ("plugins", effectively, to do word expansion with macros), WP being DOS-based (faster screen UI/etc), and, to some measure, experience.

One family member got switched to MS Word on Windows. Well.. the whole department did. They suffered through an immediate drop to about 60% of previous productivity, and it took a couple of years and severe hardware upgrades to get most of the people back to around 80% of previous productivity levels.

Why switch? MS was bundling the whole offering and tempting the company to upgrade. The management of an 'integrated stack' was seen as attractive, and the massive drop off in dept-level productivity was accepted. Management still bitched that stuff was late, and quality dropped, but... hey, network admins have a bit less work to do, and some other dept saved a few bucks.

The bundling/integration of stuff on to the OS was a big selling point, even when it led to demonstrably poorer results for some parties involved. Cool! - there's a menu with a button to do some funky text manipulation. That only takes 8 seconds instead of "having" to memorize some arcane keystrokes. When the keystrokes are memorized, though, it takes .4 seconds to accomplish the same thing.

>For laypeople, that may be fine. MS Word was atrociously bad for high-volume typing.

Totally agree. That's one of the reasons why law firms and their typists hung on to Wordperfect-DOS for a decade even after MS Word was mainstream. Very long legal documents that would choke MS Word worked fine in WordPerfect DOS.

Yep - I'd forgotten about law firms. I was a delivery driver for a couple law firms in the early 90s. I was seeing most stuff at university done on MS Word at that point, but every law firm was still on Word Perfect. The industry around vertical markets for WP was pretty strong for a long time it seemed.

I loved Wordperfect but they completely fumbled the transition to Windows. "Almost Perfect"[1] outlines their many missteps from the inside, and it's hard in retrospect to put too much blame on Microsoft for it--at most maybe for some market confusion over whether OS/2 was really the future or not.

[1]: http://www.wordplace.com/ap/index.shtml

> I now think they did amazing work in the 1980s and 1990s which got later overshadowed by the ugly "browser wars" and antitrust lawsuit.

When Windows 95 first came out, it crashed daily on my computer and friends of mine had the same experience. Sometimes it crashed multiple times a day.

I was young then and thought nothing of it. I just rebooted and played whatever game had been interrupted. But now I wonder how they got away with it.

Microsoft was excellent at marketing and when they achieved their monopoly position, they did an excellent job of shutting out competitors. By the late nineties the phrase "No one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft products" was a very popular phrase. But I wouldn't say I was wowed by their work. Windows 95, COM, MFC, etc... I don't see (or read) anyone thinking back on those days fondly.

> When Windows 95 first came out, it crashed daily on my computer and friends of mine had the same experience. Sometimes it crashed multiple times a day.

It was perfectly possible to run Windows 95 without it crashing. I ran it for around a year before the launch (the Chicago beta) and it was very stable by the end IF you had decent hardware and IF you set it up correctly.

But the PC hardware industry wasn't very well developed in 1995, and there was a huge variation in products that took a while to shake out.

Bear in mind that Windows 95 was running on tens of millions of PCs that had never been designed to run it, and that had never been tested with it. A lot of the ones in the field were almost unique (because of variations in processors, RAM, graphics cards etc), and Microsoft had never seen many of them.

And they got away with it because people could get a PC with a good GUI and masses of compatible software for a very low price.

> By the late nineties the phrase "No one has ever been fired for buying Microsoft products" was a very popular phrase.

This is the second time recently I've seen someone on HN refer to this expression with a Microsoft branding.

The late nineties are a little too early for me to have had any awareness of technology politics. I never heard the expression you describe.

I did hear, many times, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM". It seems odd that that would have been a later form of the expression than "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft".

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" probably pre-dates the creation of Microsoft.

The saying was based on the fact that IBM, like the 7th Cavalry, would ride in to rescue large accounts if they screwed up.

I never heard it said of Microsoft in the 90s because Microsoft was never a big proportion of anybody's spending. It sold to hundreds of millions of consumers and small companies, rather than Fortune 500 companies.

I did once discuss this with one of the Microsoft salesmen who handled giant corporations, and who had been hired from IBM. He said IBM tried to get 33% of a company's IT sending whereas Microsoft tried to get 3%.

Excel started out as a Mac program. It became popular because it was that good, not because it ran on the creator's platform.

Word also started out as a Mac program. It just happened to have the same name as an old DOS program.

Microsoft's original DOS spreadsheet was called Multiplan.

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