Microsoft exec: “Summary of meeting with Steve Jobs" | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft exec: “Summary of meeting with Steve Jobs"

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I love this! It's cool seeing a boots on the ground perspective of Apple in '98. I think that thing that surprises me the most in this is that in only 10 years, apple unveils the iphone. 2010 - 2020 feels like a lot less of a jump than 1998 t0 2008.

It was.

It was a HUGE decade for everyone in the West anyways. 2008 still feels like today and it mostly is. 1998 felt like, well the 90s, we hadn't even hit 2000 yet, and had all this end of the world, next millennium zeitgeist in the air.

for the west, I feel like the pre- and post-9/11 world also was very different

I've not lived in the west, so I could be wrong. My take as a teenager in the 90s is that the world changed post internet. The second half of the 90s is when the web became mainstream (in the west).

9/11 caused untold suffering and divided the world, but the internet was the line between the 80's world and the present.

my mental model puts the years 2000 to 2019 basically as a single decade. With Corona and maybe accelerating climate desasters I don't think this will happen for the decade 2020 to 2039. But that's just me.

9/11 has had -- and continiue to have -- far-reaching consequences that have an impact many people's lives. It pales in comparison to the impact that constant internet access and mobile computing have had, though.

You mean for the US maybe. In Europe I don't think people cared that much.

It might not have had the psychological impact that it did in the US, but the world became a drastically different place afterwards with the "war" on terrorism.

In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades. 9/11 was a rude awakening, and we have been living in its shadow for the last 20 years.

>In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades.

This viewpoint was well described (and I think influenced) by Fukuyama's book "The End of History and the Last Man"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

People not, the press however is very happy to comemorate such events.

People here in Europe cared a lot. Not really for the terrorist attacks, except in an 'it happens over there too now' kind of sense.

No, general reaction was: The biggest military/nuclear power in the world is going to be very pissed, lets hope the results don't end up here.

And it did end up here. The US lost all moral high ground. All kinds of nasty military and spy industries smelled an opening, making the world a worse place.

In what regards? Asking as someone living in Europe.

(We had lots of terrorism way before 9/11.)

My initial reaction was similar, but to be fair (commercial) air travel is pretty different globally post vs ante.

It wasn't so much the terrorist act that had long consequences, but the governments' reactions to the act. The USA PATRIOT Act is probably the largest. The 20 year war machine is another. A full 20-25% of the US population under 20 has never lived in a time before our current involvement in Afghanistan. There are families where both parents and children have fought in that war. Note that both parties support this with their constant renewal. It was supposed to expire in 2005.

Then there was the torture and Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp, which is still open and housing prisoners. "We tortured some folks." War in Iraq (totally unrelated BTW), Abu Ghraib, countless civilian casualties, mass surveillance, militarization of police, it's really some horrific shit that came out of 9/11. News media lost a lot (all?) of their credibility during all this as well. For people coming of age after, all this is normal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_torture_and_prisone...

I watched some 9/11 live news broadcasts with my kids last year, because they knew of it but wanted to understand what it was like at the time. Even the clothes and hair styles of the presenters look very 80s to me.

I think cultural cycles really go roughly in double-decades. The early 60s look just like the 50s. The late 60s and 70s merge into each other. The 80s and 90s were another phase that petered out in the early 2000s. We're now in the post-2000 millennial era, so maybe another cultural phase is coming along soon.

Teens here wear jeans with holes in them. This was a trend during the punk and trash metal haydays, but I doubt the current trend is in any other way related to the punk or metal subculture. Lifestyle trends get rehashed.

With luck shoulder pads and big hair won't come back until long after I'm gone.

Old world: desktops + 56kps modem + IE 5/6 + HTML/WAP + Windows 95/98/Me + x86 Mhz 32bit processors + dozens of ports + MS Office + VB/C++

New world: desktop/laptop/mobile + 100Mbps+ cable + W3C 'compliant' browser + HTTPS/WS + Win10/Linux/MacOS + GHz 64bit x64/ARM64 + USB-esque port + MS Office/Google Docs/Open Office + js/Java/C#/C++/etc.

You forgot the tablet, arguably the biggest change aside from mobile.

> After that, we briefly discussed Amelio, and his book, and Steve said that Amelio "has fucked up everything he did, except hire Fred Anderson as CFO." He said that if you looked at all of this year's California graduating high school classes, anyone in th top 10% could have run Apple better than Amelio.

Poor old Gil...

I am not familiar with the story behind this. Is that a fair assessment or is it just unfounded critique from a person who was known to be harsh at times?

Gil was brought in to swing the axe, and he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He cancelled a bunch of stuff that was draining Apple's resources. He was never going to be popular but the point was that the next guy could come in with clean hands.

Well sure, but he also pushed for the 20th Anniversary Mac. So it's not an entirely unfair assessment.

After reading a bunch of books (including Amelio's own), this is my take:

Apple was a deeply, deeply dysfunctional company at the time. Every division and manager was fighting a war of it's own.

This was reflected in their product lineup (a million products confused and overlapping - since they were each thought up by different divisions) and OS strategy (a million technologies, sometimes innovative, sometimes not, that didn't work together).

The sales organization was also extremely dysfunctional and was busy stuffing the channel as hard as they can so each sales division could make their quarterly numbers, and then the company was saddled with massive unsold inventory when it all came back.

The reign of the previous CEO, Spindler (best known for launching the MacOS clone program) was even more disastrous https://lowendmac.com/2013/michael-spindler-peter-principle-...

Amelio managed to identify most of the issues and their source, but he was pretty helpless to actually resolve them, since the managers in the company were so defiant. He was some outsider brought in by the board, who was he to dictate orders? It took someone with the balls and the clout of Steve Jobs to actually swing the axe on people.

Amelio planned to rationalize down the products to a few simple lines (but he was only in the company for 18 months so nobody on the outside actually knows how well that would have worked). He also tried to get the sales org to stop stuffing the channels, it worked for a few quarters and then they went back to their old ways. He started the process of spinning out Newton (when Jobs came back he just axed it outright even though it could have survived on it's own without burdening Apple)

That said, a long-term Amelio CEOship would have killed Apple - all his ideas for the future lined out in his book were 100% the wrong things to do (things like doubling down on clones). He was completely clueless as a visionary.

As Apple CEO, Amelio decided to acquire NeXT which both saved Jobs’s company from imminent bankruptcy and gave Apple the OS it needed to become a consumer tech juggernaut. But I guess that doesn’t count for Steve…

Jobs probably thinks he was responsible for being acquired.

You say that sarcastically, but wasn’t he though? He clearly convinced Apple he was their best option. Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him? Compare that to Steve Jobs who unquestionably had the business and technical solution to fix Apple.

> "Why would Amelio get credit for bringing the company to such dire straits and then picking literally the only viable and mature option in front of him?"

Hindsight is always 20-20.

At the time, the Apple-NeXT deal certainly didn't seem like a no-brainer. The collective industry response was more like: "Huh. Amelio sure is paying a lot for a company that has failed three times already and is run by a has-been egomaniac."

Why shouldn't Amelio get credit for the decision he made? Granted, there were other important decision makers like Apple's CTO Ellen Hancock, who probably is the one who really picked NeXT.

Also, Amelio didn't "bring Apple to dire straits." He became CEO only ten months before the NeXT acquisition.

Even Bill Gates knew this. Throughout the 90s he saw his primary competition at the time from a technology perspective as being NeXT. When he beat up his development tools and OS platform teams over technology and tools strategy, the benchmark he measured them against was NeXT because he recognised they were best in class, regardless of their market share.

This is according to Steven Sinofsky, who was very much in a position to know as he was one of the people taking the beatings. https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/

Microsoft has been unable to leverage their desktop monopoly into a mobile market share. They lost from iOS (Apple) and Android (Google), after playing quite or double with Nokia. All of this happened under Ballmer's flag.

I said it a decade ago, Microsoft should have either acquired RIM (Blackberry) or otherwise partnered with them to make Blackberry the canonical Microsoft phone experience. If they acted fast, they could have retained a solid third place, perhaps still holding on as the handset which corporations deployed to employees.

Instead, Microsoft did to the mobile phone space what Google did with messaging platforms and gave us endless cycles of killing and reinventing them, hoping maybe something would stick.

By contrast it’s interesting to remember how much Apple got right with the iPhone in 2007. Many of the fundamentals of the hardware, software and UX were gotten right before Apple ever offered one to a paying customer.

The BlackBerry software platform was even worse than the CE kernel based Windows Mobile, so I don't see how that would have helped them.

The problem was they didn't have a competitive software platform ready in time. In 2007 Google's Android team was already several years into developing Android and immediately started pivoting it into a touch based modern desktop class OS in a mobile package. Microsoft didn't realise that's what they needed to do until 2010 when they started work on Windows Mobile 10. But even in 2007 it was too late. They would still have been several years behind Android and there would not have been space for a sub-par licensed OS up against a free competitor that was years in front of it. The game was already over, it just took them 10 years to realise it.

Actually, SJ gave great credit to the minor employee who reached out to Apple from NeXT on their own and started the whole thing going. Then at first he acted primarily as a kind of advisor and gadfly and appeared to embrace that role.

Didn't that act (plus a timely infusion of cash from none other than Microsoft themselves) more or less save Apple from (not quite as imminent) bankruptcy as well?

Jobs blackmailed Gates into that deal.

To be more precise Apple Sued Microsoft into the deal. Microsoft paid third party to steal Quicktime code written by said third party contractor for Apple.

https://www.theregister.com/1998/10/29/microsoft_paid_apple_...

The characterization of Rhapsody being "cancelled" and Mac OS X just being MacOS on a Mach Kernel is rather odd. In my recollection, the original Rhapsody plan was essentially Cocoa apps (with a NeXTStep-like look) + the Classic emulator. What the change of plans to Mac OS X did was add "Carbon" to the equation (i.e. native MacOS APIs in the unix environment), and give the whole thing a facelift.

From the point of a developer, it could be considered a major departure in that instead of a complete rewrite, apps could also become native with more modest changes. But that does not mean that the Rhapsody path was abolished — far from it.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/4B800F78-0F7...

As far as PowerPC hardware is concerned, this is not all that different from my characterization (though I was omitting the Display Postscript to Quartz transition, which was indeed quite significant).

I had not paid attention to the cross platform promises of the Rhapsody strategy, so it's possible I was missing just how much of that was publicly promised and then abolished.

I was never a NeXTStep developer, but having seen quite a bit of Cocoa code, my impression was that the compatibility hurdle for existing NeXTStep apps to becoming Cocoa apps was smaller than the one for Mac apps to becoming Carbon apps. Maybe developers with actual experience of having done such ports can comment?

I can concur with this. I am actually the youngest NeRD (NeXTStep Registered Developer) ever. I also programmed Mac applications professionally from just before OS X until after its release. I remember first seeing the API docs for it and being flooded with memories of code from a decade earlier. It was a bit weird. Keep in mind that besides the API, I also already was well versed in Objective C, so it was also not a new programming language. My peers had different experiences.

When Apple talked about this strategy externally they spoke as though it was a new product. That's how they would have pitched it to Microsoft. They wanted everyone to think of it as a modernised Mac OS, not as the NeXT OS with a Classic Mac app emulation layer.

When Corel launched Corel Linux and bundled it with WordPerfect for Linux, Microsoft immediately bought 24 million shares of Corel and then Corel killed its Linux line of products.

It was good while it lasted. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/4d/Corel_Linux.p...

Today I use FreeOffice from SoftMaker. A really nice product.

I haven't heard of FreeOffice before, it looks like an interesting product. How do they support devlopment? It is closed source and doesn't appear to have a pricing model.

EDIT: Investigating a bit more there appears to be a paid version called SoftMaker Office, so I guess the free version acts as a funnel.

Too bad the anti-trust office was on vacation that day?

Seems kinda monopolistic... You're not supposed to make "agreements" with your competitors regarding what you will and won't compete on, right? That's what they always said in those corporate training videos, anyway. How was this legal?

Everyone knows that daily reality isn't in sync with corporate training videos, regardless of the company.

They are only used for public image and putting the legal department on the safe side when things go wrong.

But there's like "doesn't follow their mottos like 'don't be evil'" and then there's "flagrant violations of federal law". No matter how disingenuous the company is, there's got to be some consequences for the latter... Or you would at least expect them to try and be circumspect about it... This just says on paper "we agreed not to compete".

Agreed, yet if most companies business practices were actually investigated properly, in every single location across the globe where they operate, it is quite clear certain locations would have already closed doors if the videos were followed to the letter.

Or in the spirit. This isn't splitting hairs: they flaunted the law and got away with it.

Would that be a bad thing? Or would that mean we'd have healthier competition?

Surely, as it would mean less corruption actually.

From the US Department of Justice Federal Trade Commission, An Antitrust Primer:

'Market division or allocation schemes are agreements in which competitors divide markets among themselves. In such schemes, competing firms allocate specific customers or types of customers, products, or territories among themselves.'

'This primer briefly describes the most common antitrust violations and outlines those conditions and events that indicate anticompetitive collusion.'

When I was querying Windstream and AT&T for internet service, one refused to build new service, even if we paid for the construction cost, because the other was already in the area.

The question is are they doing it because it’s not cost effective and they don’t have the infrastructure to compete, or because of an internal agreement not to intrude on each others turf?

> The question is are they doing it because it’s not cost effective and they don’t have the infrastructure to compete

If it's cost prohibitive then the solution is common carrier status to become like electrical distribution network.

If it's not cost prohibitive that then the solution is criminal prosecution. It doesn't matter whether or not there's a formal internal agreement; there's clearly intent and informal collusion.

Unfortunately I don't have the answer here. And it was 9 years ago so well beyond meaning other than an anecdote.

I got the same feel, but there were collaborating on somethings so those discussions were legit. But yeah, the minutes don’t read like two competing companies trying to steal each other business.

The fact that they were also collaborating legitimately in some parts of the deal doesn't justify the fact that they were also colluding blatantly in other parts of the deal.

But who is gonna fine Google or Microsoft? The US certainly benefits from these huge corporations, so there isn’t much incentive to hinder them with legislation and fines.

The problem is politicians have realised that these corporations, particularly the ones with significant social media presence, have enormous influence on political discourse, and thus the fate of politicians themselves. There is no way they are going to leave that to chance, or what to them probably seem like arbitrary platform policies and algorithms.

I didn’t see anything in the email that suggested they were agreeing to partition the market. Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. Office. Who would? Office is awesome and it’s not Apple’s wheelhouse. ClarisWorks would need massive resources to compete. They were just being transparent that they weren’t in the business of serious Office-suite-like development. The rest of the points seemed like they were quid-pro-quo decisions that could potentially give customers a lot of value: QuickTime support on MS machines, Microsoft developing IE for Apple (and Office)... in this context, Apple is talking to Microsoft as a software package provider, Apple needs partnerships with these companies so their OS can get traction.

"Apple said they didn’t want to compete with Apple w.r.t. "

... That's what market partitioning _is_ though, right?

The two parties could independently come to the conclusion that Apple shouldn't compete with Office, but actually discussing it (and documenting the discussion!) is a flagrant violation of U.S. anti-trust laws.

Apple probably also did not want to compete with Michelin w.r.t tires either.

Partitioning the market is when you, well, partition the MARKET, meaning divide up potential BUYERS of your product with some other company selling a similar product, so that your company is effectively a monopoly within the subset of buyers that you were allocated.

So the buyers for office software may have had two options, but after this deal there was effectively a monopoly with both potential subsets of buyers left with only MS Office as a choice... This reads like the definition of a monopoly from a school textbook...

This is really cool. I like that the author clearly sees a lot of things from Apple's side, particularly with regard to ClarisWorks, and its market positioning vs Office and MS Works. It makes sense that a ClarisWorks user would be less likely to upgrade to MS Office anyway, vs an MS Works user, since you're now buying from a different vendor. But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway.

I don't remember how things went down in the browser wars. The author of the email seems to think Apple might not be willing to ship a non-OS X-native [Netscape] Navigator with new machines. I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.

> I do remember IE being popular enough on OS 9 or X, but I can't remember which, and I certainly don't remember if Navigator or IE shipped with OS X, but it had to have SOMETHING.

From Wikipedia:

> As a result of the five-year agreement between Apple and Microsoft in 1997, it was the default browser on the classic Mac OS and Mac OS X from 1998 until it was superseded by Apple's own Safari web browser in 2003 with the release of Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_Mac_OS...

> But he candidly says that MS Works isn't as good as ClarisWorks anyway.

Keeping MS Works bad may have been deliberate on their part, to avoid cannibalizing Office sales.

I'm sure it was. MS Works had tonnes of limitations that you hit pretty easily.

I believe IE was bundled starting with OS 8 or 9. (definitely 9, but might have started with 8) The document explains a lot of the 'gushing' Steve Jobs was doing about IE around that time. Sounds like there was at least a handshake agreement to push IE hard on Apple's side which they definitely did. (i.e. this goes beyond the previously published agreements re: bundling it etc as Steve in particular was really doing a hard sell on IE to Mac users at the time at a couple of events)

The document is also interesting as it helps explain why ClarisWorks died on the vine the way it did. I remember filing a bug report on a years old problem around that time for a family member which Apple never did fix, or anything else, in ClarisWorks until they eventually abandoned it completely years later. Too bad, it was a nice user-friendly, entry-level productivity suite.

It's hard to search for this kind of thing to back me up, but I vaguely remember IE 5 on Mac not only being better than Netscape, but also being the best implementation of IE across all platforms. It had a ton of unique features and its rendering engine was superior to the Trident engine used by IE on Windows.

Tasman (layout engine) - Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_(layout_engine)

I recall this too (with equal vagueness). I remember even at the time talking about IE for Mac being a great browser. Basically a completely different product than its Windows counterpart.

It was a great browser, which even us hardcore Macians had to admit. It was so much better than the Windows IE, and MS took great care to make it feel Mac-like. So apart from the strange in the top right corner, it was a very good Mac app.

It was way ahead of IE for Windows.

http://tantek.com/log/2004/06.html

It still regularly crashed my OS 9 Mac.

But then, what didn't? ;-)

If I recall correctly, it had the best CSS support at the time.

Mac OS 8.x and 9.x shipped with both Netscape and IE4, 4.5, then 5, but IE was the default for the "Browse the Web" alias on the Desktop of new installations. Mac OS X 10.0 shipped with a very early Carbonized IE 5.0 that was unstable enough to earn a "prerelease" label on the startup screen. At the time I remember a lot of people did actually prefer to use the Classic OS version of IE 5.0 over the IE beta, at least until OmniWeb 4.0 came out around the same time as OS X 10.1 https://www.macworld.com/article/151892/omniweb.html

Announcing the browser deal is the only time I heard an entire crowd boo Stebe https://youtu.be/WxOp5mBY9IY?t=154

It's also amusing how Steve was still obviously using Concurrence instead of a Mac to do these early iCEO-era presentations http://www.kevra.org/TheBestOfNext/ThirdPartyProducts/ThirdP...

IE was great on OS 8 and OS 9. It’s shortcomings were becoming annoying and embarrassing by Jaguar (OS X 10.2), at which point Safari brought huge quality of life changes.

IE for Mac was better than IE for Windows at that time as well.

Good reminder of how ephemeral things are in the software industry -- much of the software we use today will be obsolete in 15 years.

"All the work that I have done in my life will be obsolete by the time I'm 50, Apple II is obsolete now, Apple Is were obsolete many years ago. The Macintosh is on the verge of becoming obsolete in the next few years.

This is a field where one does not write a Principia which holds up for 200 years. This is not a field where one paints a painting that will be looked at for centuries or builds a church that will be admired and looked at in astonishment for centuries. No, this is a field where one does one's work and in 10 years it's obsolete and really will not be usable in 10 or 20 years. It's sort of like sediment of rocks. ... You're building up a mountain and you get to contribute your little layer of sedimentary rock to make the mountain that much higher, but no one on the surface, unless they have X-ray vision, will see your sediment. They'll stand on it, it'll be appreciated by that rare geologist, but no, it's not like the Renaissance at all. It's very different ..."

For perspective:

The GNU toolkit (gcc and coreutils at least) has been continuously developed for over thirty years of unbroken project history. Linux itself, if you are willing to do a bit of repository surgery[1], has a continuous commit history dating back to 1991. The X Window System was created in 1984, and you can still run GUI applications from that period[2] on a modern system. Even KDE is over twenty years old.

[1] https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux

[2] http://www.theresistornetwork.com/2013/12/a-testament-to-x11...

Coreutils are starting to get competitors rewritten in Rust, though.

And I see 20 year olds downgrading their Ryzen powered workstation to the same experience I was having putting DG/UX xterm sessions on IBM X Windows terminals in 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DG/UX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal

One wonders why they have bothered to pay for such hardware in first place.

Then I remember about Electron and Docker.

All of which are much more like layers of sedimentary rock, unknown and invisible to most people, than they are like cathedrals admired by all.

Only partially true. A very young industry changes rapidly, but as it matures it slows down. IT has already started slowing down.

See Moore's Law & related: desktop PCs/laptops are not hugely more powerful than they were 10 years ago. A top of the line PC from 2010 is quite usable even today. This will become true soon for smartphones, who were badly under-powered in 2007 and now they're quite usable.

Servers are getting there, and actually most devices, the same.

Software is more volatile but even there we're slowing down a bit. Gmail has been out for... 15 years? And it's reasonably likely it will still be usable in 15 more years.

I am afraid that JS/CSS/HTML/Node/Electron will survive anything just like cockroaches :(.

Under attendees:

> Ken Bereskin, Dir., Mac OS Technologies product marketing -- (a fool)

yikes.

Yeah, what an embarrassing thing to have known about you even 20 years later. For that to be sent in an email to Bill Gates, must've been blatant.

All that is "known" is that he rubbed his opposite number at Microsoft the wrong way. It looks like what the author of the memo wanted was a commitment from Apple not to bundle ClarisWorks, and Bereskin was the one who said no (possibly even the one who had the JOB to say no, because Steve at the time needed to be the good cop).

Well, I wouldn't think that someone doing his job and taking a contrary business position would be worth calling out as "a fool" in the introduction of the minutes of the meeting. It seems like a personal observation to rise to the level of attaching it to someone's name. Besides, anything policy/business-outcome related was kept to the rest of the memo.

I think it says more about the person that wrote the email than the target of their ire.

Does anyone have the story behind that?

Seems like a weird comment to make in the context of the rest of the e-mail.

Is there a direct link to the images? Twitter’s mobile site makes it impossible to zoom adequately in landscape mode.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGs2nX0As7BSC?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGte-X0A8KMjl?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGuKZXwAkYWxT?format=png&name=...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5oGu-5XIAUAlWI?format=png&name=...

Wha... halfway down the second page (second bullet point) there's the note that

> *It's MacOS, but certain APIs are no longer supported. [...] They are also dropping support for stupid things like publish and subscribe."

I'm extremely curious to know how this worked in Classic - and how different it is from how things are done today.

This was an OS-wide API. On the surface, it worked somewhat like Smart Objects in Photoshop, but rather than converting a file on embedding, you first "published" it and then the content could be embedded by any "subscriber" that supported/made use of the API. (Editing the file on the publisher side would consequently update any embedded content. Like in PS, any attempt to edit a subscription would open it in the publishing application.) However, I have no idea about any implementation details.

As a classic MacOS developer back in the day, "publish and subscribe" doesn't mean what you probably think it does. It isn't like "publish and subscribe" in Javascript or similar.

In classic MacOs "publish and subscribe" was a kind of real-time clipboard which allowed you to paste contents from one application in to another and have it updated in real-time if you edited the source file. The idea was interesting, but it created odd interactions and corner cases that weren't nice. It was also very slow and buggy in practice. Not many applications supported it, and those that did didn't support it well in my opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_and_Subscribe_(Mac_OS)

"Most of the value of Office is in Word"

I wonder if the rest of it is in Excel or Powerpoint?

Excel. There are many good Powerpoint replacements, and few competent Excel ones.

I’d argue that Powerpoint has negative value overall. But I suppose technically Microsoft still gets positive money for it.

Slide presentation software in general - or PowerPoint specifically?

I think PowerPoint has simultaneously been the best - and the worst - thing to happen to academia in the past 100+ years, and PP has only been out with good MM projectors for only the past 20 years - it has tremendous value. It’s only a bad thing when people aren’t using it correctly - though I appreciate that good software should be difficult to use incorrectly.

(okay, next worst thing after Blackboard).

Slide presentation software in general. It is perhaps OK to present simple subjects to a crowd with the aid of visuals such as slides, but the more complex the subject is the more the slides will impede understanding. Think of the slides used to present technical data about foam hitting the Space Shuttle to managers at NASA just after the launch of Columbia. They were garbage in several ways, but chiefly because they had only nested bulleted lists rather than just paragraphs and sentences.

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

It is possible to lie using ordinary sentences and paragraphs, but slides pile on even more ways to deceive. They encourage you to break up the flow of information into optimistic headlines and soundbites followed by fine print that is easily ignored.

Slide decks are humanity’s most dangerous invention. We should teach our enemies about slide decks. When we meet aggressive aliens, we can sell them Powerpoint to slow them down. Too bad our own military already uses it; I’ve read that all of our high–level military planning is done by Powerpoint presentations.

What I usually see are poor attempts to replace Powerpoint, usually with coding in JavaScript or basic HTML features.

As usual, most people attempting to replace Office don't get the features that are actually available.

Apple Keynote is good though.

Yes, fully agree, that is however also most likely not on the list of Powerpoint haters.

I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives - you need only look at Excel’s embarrasingly long UserVoice page to see the myriad of small little bugs and missing functionality that make it extremely painful to use, but will never be fixed because it breaks backwards-compatibility or just because “reasons”.

Amongst my personal peeves are: inability to do non-integral scrolling; no multi-statement functions or inline-variables; still no sane and consistent CSV support; and still no TryParseDateExact and TryParseCurrency functions - using Excel when you want to use ISO 8601 consistently is painful.

https://excel.uservoice.com/

Excel recently got variables with LET and functions with LAMBDA

> I argue there are plenty of competent Excel alternatives

Which are they? Libreoffice calc has a lot of jagged edges, google sheets is very slow on even modest sheets.

Complaints show the opposite of what you think it does. People are using it despite the flaws because it is irreplaceable.

There are the programming languages everyone complains about, and the ones that nobody uses.

Most popular does not equate best quality. It means just exactly what it states: most popular (within a target audience). All too often, something less popular is better in one way or another but does not gain traction. For example, because if network effect or because of monopoly abuse.

FWIW, I can do everything I need with LibreOffice. It even runs stable on my Mac. However, on Citrix, my employer does not have LibreOffice, so I gotta resort to MS Office. I gotta work with the tool which is tge default, my choice of preference be damned. Which is rather standard. And students learn to use MS Office because if massive discounts. Bail 'em in when young, and you get lifetime customer. How I ended up staying with my bank post student years.

Capitalism is an imperfect fitness algorithm, but it is pretty damn good

At that time it was. Lots of business process involved creating documents to be printed, sometimes manually signed, posted and microfilmed eventually. While a lot of internal stuff at corporations ran in computers, interactions between business entities, consumers and governments largely depended on dead-tree flows. Word processing was huge during the 80s and 90s because of that. Nowadays? Excel is what sells office subscriptions beyond the ones sold solely by inertia and brand, backwards compat and brand loyalty

The ease of publishing to the web, and the rise of PDF for printable docs eventually eroded a lot of the value of Word, I suppose.

Email first, then Web.

I'd say that Powerpoint is a large driver too

Many people may not know/remember how common it was for people to use Word to spell/grammar check everything, thanks to Microsoft's strategic decision to only include the functionality in Office. Those little squiggles indicating spelling errors in any (especially browser) text fields didn't arrive on the scene until 2005 or so. As a result, it wasn't unusual to draft an email message in Word and then copy/paste it into your browser. Microsoft also made it an option to use Word to compose Outlook (i.e. corporate email) messages. Microsoft was pretty stingy about features like spell check even in their own OS because they obviously wanted everyone to also buy Office. Word was to text as IE was to browsing in Microsoft's worldview.

I remember thinking it was super cool to have aspell everywhere in Linux, when Windows couldn't get that outside of Word.

Word is to text as the current javascript bloat is to browsing.

Word is just 20 years early and foretelling the fate that are to befell to internet browsing.

Fortunately, site like hn and tools like vim and format like markdown still exists.

This feels wrong though, most of the value of Office is certainly, at least now in retrospect, in Excel. It is a reactive programming language that powers virtually all of FO, MO and some BO functions (i.e. everyone from people on the desk to the people reconciling books at quarter end) while also enabling Accounting/Audit firms, financial services operations vendors, and people actually trading on the desk to do their daily work to perform simulations and program without needing to remember obscure programming libraries if they are not SWE domain experts.

Hard to imagine Word being even remotely as valuable, but maybe my perspective is too narrow.

Excel may be globally more important of a product but, Word is certainly more popular.

Now it depends on how you calculate value.

Why are you so certain? Google trends seems to suggest Excel is more popular:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F0...

People searching for something is reflective of what people search for, in some cases for products it's reflective of popularity but, I would argue in this case there's a good chance people are searching for Excel more for tips/troubleshooting/how to, than purchase intention.

If you look at a range of wide range business functions, opening and editing text documents is more prevalent than using spreadsheets.

I asked you how you were "certain" what you were saying was true.

You haven't provided anything in answer to that, and instead just criticize something that shows what you claimed wasn't the case.

So, please, go ahead and provide data showing what you're claiming is in fact the case.

I don’t think that’s a good indicator of popularity. Most people are going to be searching for “how to do X” with the product name to refine results. Excel is more complex, so likely has more of those sorts of search queries.

Thus, why I asked the person above how they are "certain" of a thing.

Seems like a double standard. Person above makes a claim with nothing to back it, I counter the claim with an actual cite. Everyone jumps on me instead of them, for, providing anything at all?

Google trends indicate that Excel is harder to use without a manual than word, nothing else.

I don't think "in retrospect" is the right ready to look at it. Certainly now Excel is the most valuable part of Office. But in 1998, people weren't doing business by emailing spreadsheets back and forth (at least not like today). They were writing documents in Word, printing them out, and then snail-mailing or faxing them to people. And "desktop publishing" was also a thing back then.

>It is a reactive programming language

I'm willing to bet that 95% of users don't look at Excel the same way you do.

That's a shame, 95% of users are clearly missing out on the thrill of bending a MSFT product to their will, a rare occurrence in and of itself as well as never needing to rely on someone else for data analysis/transformation for their own work.

I worked at a hedge fund briefly (recently) and the rest of the investments/trading group literally didn't know what they were doing in terms of tooling/analysis/etc and that's a separate story lol (seriously - after the fund went from $30mm AUM to $1.2b before I joined, I immediately suggested hedging at least 50% of the portfolio with some puts 3 months out, and the 'founder' immediately said 'no but we are long')

Anyways so yeah instead of advancing the field with my sexy python backend code, sadly I ended up being tasked with all of the new interim strategy, while also needing to find alpha. So while I was writing a core real time risk web app implementation in Python/C, along with a trading system based on some off the shelf tooling with some custom infra by yours truly, I was also tasked with creating a "temporary solution" that was just based on Google Sheets (The Firm™ decided to strategically adopt Google for everything, even though Sheets is garbage) - INDEX/MATCH don't work, and none of the advanced functions work. Of course, building the functionality into Google's little app is not scalable and probably won't even exist in another 3 years, but Excel is just so great if you have a super small dataset that you need to slice and dice for some quick analytics. Then I'd just port over the functionality to C and write some wrappers to facilitate quick computation in Jupyter Console. Really great reactive stuff. And with xlwings, I could do some quick analysis and then just rip that into my running session and then do whatever analytics I wanted to. Going on a huge tangent here, apologies. But Excel is great and it could be even better if they figure out a more efficient stream-based system to get rid of annoying hangs while you are processing a larger dataset, especially if there are many complex formulas embedded in the sheet (again, obviously this can be handled by constantly dumping the data and then re-performing analysis on the derived dataset without all the insane, nested Excel formulas across a bunch of cells).

Pretty sure a minimal implementation of Excel with INDEX, MATCH, FILTER, ROWS, SEQUENCE ( & and maybe TRANSPOSE for good measure ) would be Turing complete.

EDIT: This went super off-topic. I apologize, but basically moral of the story is... if your requirements are ambiguous, your friend Excel is there waiting to help. Just gotta know your tooling and learn all those weird functions you think you normally wouldn't reach for!

EDIT2: Avoid computers if possible

It’s fascinating that Balmer was not CCed

This is really fascinating to read. I’m glad Apple wasn’t enthusiastic about IE.

What I think is interesting is that Jobs made all these decisions and cared so much about the software experience.

If you told me Satya Nadella doesn't use Windows I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest.

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