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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Don't forget that Microsoft invented the notion of the office suite. Rather than buy separate programmes, you'd pay roughly the price of any two of the competition, and get W ord, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and Visio.

Plus it all ran together, through OLE and COM, so that spreadsheets could be embedded into documents or presentations. If the recipient didn't have the suite, they'd need to buy it. Viral marketing, 1990s style.

WP did get caught flat-footed on the Windows transition, but everyone, including Microsoft, had been pushing OS/2 up until that point.

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> everyone, including Microsoft, had been pushing OS/2 up until that point.

True up to a point. From at least the early 90s, Microsoft was trying like crazy to get companies to write Windows software instead ;-)

Isn't that after Windows was released?

And it's worth noting that Windows itself didn't really show up big until Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. Win 3.1 Workgroup was released in October, 1992, and the really stable version, 3.11, in November of 1993. That was still being rolled out up to several years later (enterprises are conservative). There was app development for it, yes, but Microsoft seemed to have already established its Office strategy. (Just checked: the initial announcement was in 1988.)

This is somewhat ancient history, and I rather dimly remember it (my primary platforms then were already largely server: Unix and VMS, plus others), but desktop was how I accessed the "real computer".

Microsoft was trying to get companies to write Windows software in 1986-87. At the time, it argued that developing for Windows was developing for OS/2 PM.

Borland, Ashton-Tate and Lotus refused. In late 1987, Philippe Kahn said "People are afraid Microsoft is going to take control of the operating system." [1]

Microsoft was afraid that IBM going to take control of the operating system.

Windows 3.0 was enough of a success for Microsoft to intensify it efforts....

[1] http://voteview.uga.edu/gates.html

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