If Apple had succeeded in buying Powerpoint, whatever alternative Microsoft purchased (or made) would have become the de facto standard anyway.
As a Macintosh fan since 1985 (when I first got my hands on one) I am always curious at the types of apps that began first on the Macintosh. That PowerPoint began on the Mac was not something that I previously knew about but when I saw the Mac screenshot in the article it all became clear to me somehow.
People of course take issue with this, but I feel the early Mac interface and Mac-native apps encouraged a kind of creative way of thinking and so brought about even more creative apps to the platform.
As a contrapositive (?): I dislike the user interface for Adobe Reader (Acrobat) on the Mac, very un-Mac-like. I was told by someone on the team that this was deliberate — trying to fit in with Microsoft's stable of "office apps".
Maybe that's more of a discussion of whether an app should conform to the UI of a platform or the UI of a popular "suite".
I think Excel and Word were originally Mac products.
Besides the odd PDF that CoreGraphics/PDFKit can't handle, I like that Reader gives me "booklet printing" in page setup so that I can print 2-up with the correct page ordering to get a (5 ½ x 8 ½, U.S.) folded book in the end.
I like nothing else about Reader.
You might take a look at this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-RpNFa6_OiY
EDIT: Wait, I don't see that in Preview, MacOS Monterey. I wonder if it is a feature of the printer driver (tried both my Brother and HP, no go).
I used to work on Agfa’s RIP back in the day.
I imagine it's a printer-implemented feature, like duplex, with a very high-level option flag. A Postscript printer with a full-page RIP buffer could probably do it pretty easily if it wasn't extremely resource constrained. A RIP that did banding internally, re-compositing the PS source several times (are there [still] such things?) would have a hard time. A bitmapped printer (the cheap all-in-ones) would need to hold the entire page in memory on the Mac. Back in the day (way, way back), at least, drivers would process in bands, and the apps were required to re-draw the relevant parts of the page for each band. There wasn't any provision in the API to work on multiple pages at once. I don't know if application-level banding is still a thing, but could see echoes of incompatibility remaining.
Edit: n-up implemented in the OS can be tricky for Postscript printers. It requires nesting pages inside pages. Ill-mannered, but legal, Postscript can cause issues. It might be better with newer versions of PS, but the OS would still need to support older printers with old versions.
The DOS predecessor to Excel was Multiplan, which again predates the Mac, but Excel 1.0 was indeed a Mac-only product; Excel 2.0 was the first cross-platform version.
Another interesting example is Halo, which was originally planned as a Mac exclusive and introduced as such by none other than Steve Jobs during a Macworld keynote. Then Microsoft acquired Bungie while building up a stable of exclusive launch titles for the original Xbox, and it didn't see a Mac release until after the Windows version shipped a couple years later.
Was there anything like the After Dark screensaver on Windows before it exploded on the Mac scene?
I’ve also had a product I worked on in a keynote by Jobs. A nervous time.
I remember getting a giant box copy of it when a company my dad worked for was shutting down, it was years after it had been released but it had a massive manual and was pretty powerful.
Not entirely