The incredible story of PowerPoint

Note: It is almost impossible to imagine a modern business community without PowerPoint. How many cups of coffee were drunk while watching colorful presentations, how many conferences and webinars got the visuals thanks to the two guys who had once left Apple in search of their own dreams and ways to wipe their favorite company’s nose. But let's not get ahead of ourselves ...

One famous speaker recalled: going into the hall for making a speech is a “frightening experience”, despite the fact that “there is a projector and all kinds of technologies that can help in this matter.” The word “technology” refers to PowerPoint, Microsoft's presentation program. And that very speaker was Colin Powell, the former US Secretary of State.



Powell's [2003] presentation consisted of 45 slides. Some included only text, others included photographs or maps. On some slides were embedded video clips. For 75 minutes that the speech lasted, everything worked flawlessly. Years later, Powell recalled: “Having finished, I realized that I really liked all this.” His speech to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 was one of the most famous PowerPoint presentations of all time.





Powell's speech is a prime example of what PowerPoint became in 2003. An uncompromising communication and persuasion tool known throughout the world. Since then, his dominance has only strengthened. Representatives of the US State Department used the same program to persuade the world community, and schoolchildren - for reports on the planets of the solar system, penguins and poets. Microsoft boasts 1.2 billion copies of PowerPoint sold. On average, this is about one copy for 7 people. Every month, people around the world launch PowerPoint over 200 million times, and although no one counts, the total number of slides in PowerPoint presentations has long exceeded several billion. The influence of PowerPoint is so great that some very authoritative people condemn its influence on the thinking of users .

PowerPoint has penetrated the life of a modern user so deeply that even a question about its history may seem strange. But PowerPoint, like any commercial product, has a certain life cycle. It all started [a little over] 30 years ago, in 1987.

It is noteworthy that the founders of the company in Silicon Valley, which created PowerPoint, were not at all planning to create a presentation program, not to mention creating a tool that would change negotiations and business meetings around the world. Rather, PowerPoint was the fruit of broken hopes, which pushed the startup from failure and then exceeded all the expectations of its creators.

PowerPoint was not the first PC-based presentation software. If you count from 1982, before the advent of PowerPoint, there were approximatelyhalf a dozen other similar programs . So his victory was not the result of a “pioneer advantage”. Moreover, many of the familiar PowerPoint features — a slide theme with text and graphics, bulleted lists, slide shows, a slide sorter, and even animated transitions — did not arise in it at all. And yet he managed to become a kind of Kleenex [a more popular example in the West when a company name or a single product became a household name by analogy with Xerox] or Scotch. The word "PowerPoint" is now sometimes referred to as any presentation created on a computer.

PowerPoint, like its predecessors, borrowed the concept of a slide theme from the world of photography. Some presentation programs actually made it possible to create 35 mm slides for display using a slide projector. And many early programs did generate paper slides that could be included in the report, transferred to a transparent film for use in the codoscope, or saved as digital files for display on the monitor.

We can say that users of personal computers of the 1980s, especially corporate ones, had a good choice, and the business software market was actively gaining momentum. Programs for creating spreadsheets, documents, databases and business graphics have formed a whole niche worth several million dollars. At that time, the distribution of business programs was considered a new stage in the automation of office work: computers began to appear not only in accounting, but also in other departments and even in the offices of the office elite. Both the intended and actual users of the new business software were white-collar workers, from mid-level managers to Mahogany Row executives.

PowerPoint appeared at the very moment when personal computers were just beginning to take over American offices. The main driving force was IBM PC , which the “blue giant” introduced in 1981. By then, the entire office industry in America, both corporate and government, was already used to buying computers from IBM. A new kind of machine, personal computers, spread like wildfire.

The foundation for this “invasion” was laid in the previous decade in the technosocial vision of the “office of the future” of the 1970s. It all began, as well as much of what has become commonplace in the modern world of the Internet and personal computers, at the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). It was founded in 1970 specifically to create the computing systems that the office of the future “white-collar workers” will be equipped with - an arena in which the company hoped to get no less laurels than photocopying. Many young and ardent scientists and engineers hired to work at PARC were previously familiar with computer programs funded by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Agency (ARPA) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of Utah, and SRI .

In 1972, PARC began work on a new personal computer. It is called Alto. Led by Alan Kay , Butler Lampson , Bob Taylor and Chuck Tuckerall PARC specialists were fascinated by the new great idea: in the future, each person will have their own computer. Such as Alto. And these computers will be networked together and other, more powerful computers, both local and remote. This network will form a whole web of communication and computing resources that goes far beyond the capabilities of any individual personal computer. As a result of their work, Ethernet appeared, as well as the PARC Universal Packet (PUP) protocol, the predecessor of TCP / IP on the modern Internet.

The creators of Alto emphasized the graphic capabilities of computers, devoting most of their hardware and software to working with high-resolution images, including typography, drawings, digital photographs and animation. This was a huge improvement over the usual computers of the time, which still used punch cards, paper printouts, teletypes and primitive terminals.

Alto users talked to him through a graphical interface. They could receive, generate and manipulate information. Even the text was interpreted by the computer as an image. Computer control was carried out using a standard keyboard and a new mouse , which appeared in the laboratory of SRI Douglas Engelbart .

This graphic revolution in computer technology is perhaps the most striking reflection in one of the programming languages ​​Alto, Smalltalk. Developed by [Alan] Kay, Dan Ingalls , Adele Goldberg and others, Smalltalk was not just a language, but a whole programming environment. It represented a whole graphical user interface for a PC, including a conditional desktop with overlapping windows, contextual and pop-up menus, a file manager, scrollbars, mouse click selection, and even cutting, copying and pasting. Many guests who saw the Alto system in action considered it revolutionary.

One of these “guests” was Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. After Xerox invested in Apple in 1979, PARC researchers told Apple engineers and executives in detail about Smalltalk and other programs that were previously only available to Xerox insiders. Jobs was so amazed at what he saw that he decided to reorient Lisa, a business computer developed by Apple, on the ideology of PARC. A few years later, when Jobs went into another project aimed at creating an inexpensive computer, he also pushed him to the ideology of PARC. This computer has become a Macintosh.

What does all this have to do with PowerPoint? Apple spent resources - both human and financial - to implement the PARC paradigm in Lisa and Macintosh, but not all employees were happy with this. In particular, those who supported the existing lines of Apple II and III felt that their efforts were wasted. By 1982, the patience of Apple III Product Marketing Manager Taylor Polman and Apple II and III Software Marketing Manager Rob Campbell had completely broken. Together they quit their job at Apple and set up their own company, which will spawn PowerPoint in a few years.


Rob Campbell, Taylor Polman

There was one thing that combined Polman and Campbell, but turned them away from Apple. It consisted in the fact that they were both made from a different test than the “computer scientists” who created Lisa and Macintosh. Although both Polman and Campbell were technically savvy, they were primarily interested in marketing and sales. Prior to Apple, Polman worked in the marketing department at Hewlett-Packard, and Campbell ran a small accounting software company.

They left Apple in late 1982, and by early 1983 had attracted $ 600,000 in venture capital investments to create a software company they called Forethought. It's funny, but the goal of the startup was to convey the ideology of PARC to the IBM PC and its clones and essentially outplay Apple on its own field. In the same yearApple Lisa went on sale for about $ 10,000 (more than $ 25,000 by modern standards). And two years earlier, Xerox launched its own Xerox Star personal computer at an even higher price. The idea of ​​Polman and Campbell was to bring a graphical software environment, like that of Xerox Alto, to extremely popular, but graphic, weak PCs.

Forethought founders intended to circumvent Xerox Star and Lisa by introducing yet another important Smalltalk feature: object-oriented programming.. Simply put, the traditional programming approach implied that data and procedures are processed separately. In object-oriented programming, data and procedures are combined into “objects” that can interact with each other.

OOP proponents argued that the modularity of object-oriented programming provides faster development, flexibility, and dynamism. For example, sophisticated Smalltalk programmers were able to change the GUI programs directly during its execution. Since then, object-oriented programming has become a key paradigm for most popular programming languages.

Polman and Campbell introduced the Foundation's Object Oriented Software Platform, which focused on documents. Each Foundation document functioned like Smalltalk objects. Users could link documents to each other and create, for example, reports containing graphs of recent sales, statistical analysis of customers, drawings of proposed product changes and explanatory text blocks. Each element was lively - flexible and programmable. Spreadsheets, databases, figures, texts - Foundation handled them in two ways. The user could select the document with a mouse click and use the context menu to perform the desired action. Foundation was essentially Smalltalk for office workers.

Forethought was staffing with Xerox PARC developers familiar with object-oriented programming and WYSIWYG applications, in which the text and graphics displayed on the screen look very similar to how they will appear on print. In order to implement some of the features, the startup signed a number of contracts with external suppliers and even acquired a powerful VAX computer from Digital Equipment Corp for software development .

But not even a year had passed before the company faced its first difficulties. Firstly, the developers were seriously worried: to launch the Foundation, a very powerful computer was required. There were enough “horses” under the hood of Apple Lisa, but it failed in the market. At the same time, the Macintosh was clearly weak. And the IBM PC lagged behind the expectations and plans of Forethought.







Even more troubling was the announcement by Oracle that it would take a whole year to conclude a contract for database code. This meant that the launch of the Foundation was unbearably delayed. Forethought was already financially constrained, so independent development of the database was out of the question. The company plunged into a deep existential crisis.

Instead of liquidating the company, management and investors decided to "restart" Forethought - in modern terms, to make a pivot. Foundation work was suspended and the company focused on publishing software. That is, in the production, marketing and support of computer programs written by third-party companies. The Forethought Publishing Division has released software for the Apple Macintosh under the Macware brand. And it was a success. The biggest hit, oddly enough, was a database program called FileMaker .

The financial situation of the company has improved due to sales of FileMaker, and Forethought began to develop its own software. New projects created by specially hired talented scientist Robert Gaskins. Gaskins was a scholar: before joining the company, he simultaneously wrote doctoral dissertations in English, linguistics and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley. In turn, he hired a strong young developer named Dennis Austin , who had previously developed compilers at Burroughs and was involved in creating a graphical-based operating system for the laptop project.



Robert Gaskins, Dennis Austin, Tom Rudkin

Gaskins and Austin worked closely together to conceptualize and develop the new Forethought product. Gaskins discerned the potential in presentation software and suggested that the PARC principle is applicable in a similar application. According to his idea, the user can create slides of text and graphics in the WYSIWYG graphical environment, and then output them to 35 mm slides, films, video displays and projectors or exchange them electronically via the Internet and e-mail. The presentation will be directly “transferred” from the user's head to the slides, bypassing the art department of the company.

Gaskins initially planned to ship a new product called Presenter to IBM personal computers and their clones. However, he and Austin soon realized that the Apple Macintosh was a more promising launch pad. The documentation for the first version of Presenter described a program that allows the user to print slides on the new Apple LaserWriter and copy printouts onto transparencies for use with the codoscope.

Austin immediately started writing Presenter in Apple Pascal on Lisa, and later switched to Macintosh. Tom Rudkin , an experienced developer, joined him , and together they tried to make a product that looks as similar as possible to the Macintosh interface. Presenter source code contained code from Apple MacWrite's own word processor.

In April 1987, Forethought introduced its new presentation program to the market. It embodied all the achievements and ideas, only the name has changed. Presenter turned into PowerPoint 1.0, even the earliest versions of the program where these names coexisted and clashed with each other were preserved. The product was a huge success in the Macintosh community. In the first month, Forethought recorded PowerPoint sales of $ 1 million with a net profit of $ 400 thousand, which was comparable to development costs. And only three months after the advent of PowerPoint, Microsoft acquired Forethought for $ 14 million.

PowerPoint became Microsoft's premier presentation program, initially only on a Macintosh, and then on Windows. The Forethought team became Microsoft's graphic business unit, which in the first 5 years was personally led by Gaskins. Austin and Rudkin remained the main PowerPoint developers for about 10 years. Microsoft decided to leave the graphics division in Silicon Valley instead of moving it to Redmond. This division became the first outpost of Microsoft in the western USA, and PowerPoint is still developing there.


Despite the fact that PowerPoint was doomed to success from the very beginning, Lotus Freelance and Software Publishing occupied a large market share during the first few years. The turning point for PowerPoint came in 1990, when Microsoft unveiled its “packaging” strategy and began selling Microsoft Office, combining Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, for $ 1,000 per set. Previously, each program was sold separately at a price of about $ 500 apiece.

Since most users of personal computers needed both a word processor and a spreadsheet program, the price of Microsoft for Office seemed to them quite favorable. PowerPoint rivals, on the other hand, were outraged by this tactic of distributing PowerPoint for free. Meanwhile, after 30 years, we see that Microsoft's competitive strategy was flawless.

Nowadays, the business software market is changing again, and Microsoft Office must now compete with similar free packages, such as Google Docs, LibreOffice and others. Productivity software is most often hosted in the cloud, not on the user's device. Meanwhile, as a personal computer, we now use not stationary PCs and not even laptops, but smartphones. But there is no new breakthrough paradigm like the Xerox PARC on the horizon. It looks like PowerPoint will remain exactly as we know it for a long time to come.