Apple built Keynote because Steve Jobs hates PowerPoint
sachin.posterous.com
sachin.posterous.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lighthouse_Design
Wikipedia also says that's what he used: Prior to using Keynote, Jobs had used Concurrence, from Lighthouse Design, a similar product which ran on the NeXTSTEP and OpenStep platforms
Jobs spoke highly of Lighthouse design during the 1997 WWDC video that was circulating around recently. Keynote was inspired by Concurrence. People noticed the similarities right away: http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=218463&postco...
So yeah, Jobs seems particularly interested in the relationship of NeXT, Lighthouse, and iWork/Keynote.
It could have actually killed Office.
Office's dominance or otherwise isn't down to functionality, it's down to corporate habit, compatibility, user familiarity and a big ol' dose of FUD about using something different.
Until you find a way to deal with those for major corporate clients you could produce the best productivity suite in the whole world and you still wouldn't shift Office.
There are certainly other reasons that contributed greatly to Office's monopoly but I don't see FUD as one of any consequence.
Look at the Office 2007 transition. They fundamentally changed the UI, broke alot of (poorly conceived and implemented) customer-implemented applications and changed the file format. They were in many respects new applications.
I worked for a very large organization that very strongly considered a major embrace of OpenOffice. The lawyers loved it, ODF scratched number of political itches, and Microsoft Office spend is incredible. User preference is weak when you're converting a $10,000,000 annual Office subcription spend into $500k of support staff expenses.
Problem was, when the time for talking ended and testing began, the application was universally reviled. The problem wasn't that users didn't like the apps, but they couldn't get things done.
As an aside, the interesting thing is once people get their heads round the UI they pretty much universally like it, it's just the instant reaction that's so bad.
Take an extended tour of OpenOffice for an afternoon, then use Office 2010 for a few minutes. It's no contest.
But even if it was functionally equivalent there are still reasons Office wins - because it's safe and because it's the defacto standard.
Even the cost isn't that big a deal for companies because they get security in exchange and that's one of the things big companies value above all else.
That would have been power.
I still want a native Quantrix clone on osx. (Java just won't do.)
But there is a good competitor to PowerPoint in MS Office: Visio. Visio is a great, powerful, professional piece of software, feature-rich and not that hard to learn.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Visio Visio first shipped in 1992; but it doesn't say if there ever was a Mac version. Was there?
For example, does it have diagram validation? This way your governance or architecture team can define the rules and ensure the diagrams follow them. Or can you set a schedule for it to sync to data sources (actually I couldn't even find how to sync to a data source at all)? And this is probably in there, but they make no mention of it, but can you host your diagram as a hyperlinked webpage?
I have used both a lot (Visio when it came on the sample disc before it was a Microsoft product, OmniGraffle Pro since 1.0), and have finally given up on the idea that OmniGraffle will be as good as Visio. I really wish Microsoft would port it or someone else really look at the fundamentals of what Visio is capable of.
Most CS academics use macs at this point, and I'm sure engineers would find it invaluable as well. Apple has been ignoring its more technical users and focussing on the the masses for a while now. It's rather disappointing.
The feature I'm suggesting about would allow anchoring an image to a character and allow the text to flow around it.
And you can be disappointed in Apple focusing on consumers, but you can't say it's not working for them.
You may feel that the information in a single slide with three formulas and a few bullets of prose makes it worth the effort to put up with a bad slide, but that doesn't make it a good slide by any means.
Really? I nominate MS Word for that title. Maybe we should hold a poll :)
Access is a veritable swiss army knife for non-computer people. A smart business user can do all sorts of things in an afternoon that normally require a programmer a few days to get done.
Example: My wife is a financial person whose employer doesn't have $350k to create custom reports in whatever Oracle nighmare her billing and finance system is implemented in. She can, however, export some data and do the reporting/analysis that she needs to get her job done.
The new versions are super-powerful. If your employer publishes lots of list content on SharePoint, you can treat the lists as a sort of database table in Access, and do lots of ad-hoc reporting with a tool that is right there on your PC anyway.
That said, Access gets evil when some dope decides to implement some critical application for a global company on his PC.
That said I've had to unscrew a number of spaghetti coded access based shadow systems of the "why are you running your business on this!?" type in the past and I do think these tools are to an extent responsible for leading users into the wrong paths. PowerPoint for instance guides users right into bullet point hell. You can create beautiful presentations with it but it leads you in the wrong direction from the start.
The danger of access (and excel) IMO is they encourage users who don't regularly build software to create complex systems without good tools to test and verify what they're doing and in a totally disconnected fashion. They also lack an audit trail which enables all sorts of I'll advised and sometimes unethical number fudging. Generally speaking I consider numbers out of these systems suspect until I understand how they work. as long as they're simple its manageable but they get complex quickly with no control and no record of how they got the data to a given state. This disconnection bears similar risks as a developer who goes for months without checking in code only to drop their masterpiece in on code cut day and inevitably shoot everyone in the foot.
I sympathize with people whose choice is between building a shadow system and having to deal with a Oracle's billing department (shudder). I just think there can be better solutions between "user is totally at the mercy of n thousand $/hr report writing consultants" and "user is forced to code their own disconnected data system without a net." In that situation I'd probably be recommending option #2 as well but with a please KISS warning.
Every time I read about a company making a big public mistake because they made an error in a user developed shadow system it breaks my heart a little.
I suppose its as much or more of a company culture and procedural issue than it is a tooling issue but the tools we make are responsible in some part. I think we can do better without throwing user empowerment completely out the window or spending big money to get a simple report. I think this is the most important ongoing challange in business intelligence (despite how cool "big data" is at the moment).
Today the sales reporting for the company runs off of excel sheets, hundreds of them and reconciliation is a mess. Once the reports are made, he wants it copied to powerpoint slides. People are particular about the color of the text boxes. This report has to be sent out weekly. No one reads a thing. This is a very very large MNC I am talking about. A company that employs over 70k people and makes money suggesting things like strategy and IT vision to other firms. It's appalling.
I got a terrible year end rating anyway and I was told I talk too much technology. I missed a raise and got a reduced bonus all for a bunch of monkeys in pants.
I think PowerPoint is bad just because People think that Other People will be impressed by superfluous animation and other shinies. They don't think back to the time someone last presented them with a crappy PP preso with far too much animation. (Oh and I'm sick of helping kids at work re-encode to WMV so they can embed movies in it :/)
What's the issue with Word?
1) Poor separation between content and presentation
2) Way too many features enabled by default.
3) Bulleted lists don't always indent in predictable fashion, which is annoying
4) When cooperating with a few people things go really bad, really quick (track changes, I'm looking at you). For example: header styles start to change, lists of tables start randomly missing items, references start failing,..
5) Numerous other layout issues that slowly drive you mad each time you have to use word
It's people who don't know how to present is what makes it look bad. Especially when they fill the screen with every single word they say.
PowerPoint's issue is that it doesn't look great to start with which is one of the reasons people try to "sex up" their presentations which is where all the crap starts appearing.
If PowerPoint produced better looking presentations as standard (essentially had better templates which still, even in the latest versions it doesn't), people might have less reason to give free reign to their stupidity.
With that said, I think PowerPoint is actually really good. And most presentations surprisingly good. In fact, I tend to think people tend to do a better job with their PowerPoint presentations than they do the actual paper that goes with it. The spend more effort distilling their thoughts down to what really matters, rather than endless exposition.
I just think its become trendy to hate on PowerPoint.
I've got Office 2011 for the Mac and Office 2010 for Windows. One of the first things I did was go and look to see if they'd improved the templates and they simply aren't very good.
I agree that people get bored of seeing the same ones over and over but that's part of the same problem - with so few good choices people all migrate around the small number of least bad options.
As for it being trendy to hate on PowerPoint, I don't know who you hang out with but talking about any presentation software in any terms isn't trendy among people I see... I get that certain views become fashionable but I don't think PowerPoint is the sort of thing that people round on in that way, it's a bit to "meh" to generate a bandwagon.
I don't think that's the issue. Most people use the themes availabe in the design tab. That's it. I've shown people how there are more than a thousand templates available from the file menu and almost everybody says, "Oh, I didn't know about those!".
In any case, even if it's true that they're hidden away so people find them whose fault is that?
The whole reason MS changed the UI to include the ribbon was that every time they asked people about new features they should include they were given ideas for things Office already did so the idea was to make things easier to find. Maybe it's time they did something for templates.
The second video in the original posters link, the Titanium Powerbook unveiling, Jobs had a lot of spunk compared to the most recent unveilings.