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Comment by webwanderings | Hacker News Reader

Bill Gates gave the world Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc, so the humanity could become creative, educated and thriving. Zuckerberg gave the world social media and the world became ...

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> Bill Gates gave the world Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc, so the humanity could become creative, educated and thriving. Zuckerberg gave the world social media and the world became ...

I know it's a joke, but positioning Bill Gates, especially early-'90s-era Bill Gates, as some sort of savior doesn't work for me.

Now, Knuth gave the world TeX, and I'm all on board for praising that contribution to humanity.

Hmm I get the point, still PowerPointing is always use as a term for “not really doing any work”. I guess it is because it always to try to explain to our businesses what could work and you have to do a lot before something catches on. Yeah I know, little vision in our business.

Powerpoint was actually unique from the others in that it was an acquisition from a company called Forethought. It had a single release in 1987 before MSFT bought it and was for a very long time the only part of Office not built in Redmond (the purchase promised to keep the eng team in California within the then-newly created Graphics Business Unit).

A significant part of the team is still located there.

> Bill Gates gave the world Excel, Word, Powerpoint, etc, so the humanity could become creative, educated and thriving.

He did it so he could get really really rich. That's why Zuckerberg did it too.

Well for PowerPoint, Mac users were already using MORE 3.0 (sigh)

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