The Improbable Origins of PowerPoint

PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime
as a commercial product that came onto the scene 30 years ago, in 1987. Remarkably, the founders of the Silicon Valley firm that created
PowerPoint did not set out to make presentation software, let alone build a tool that would transform group communication throughout the
world. Rather, PowerPoint was a recovery from dashed hopes that pulled a struggling startup back from the brink of failure – and succeeded
beyond anything its creators could have imagined.

PowerPoint was not the first software for creating presentations on personal computers. Starting in 1982, roughly a half-dozen other
programs came on the market before PowerPoint’s 1987 debut. Its eventual domination was not the result of first-mover advantage. What’s
more, some of its most familiar features – the central motif of a slide containing text and graphics; bulleted lists; the slideshow; the slide
sorter; and even the animated transitions between slides – did not originate with PowerPoint. And yet it’s become the Kleenex or Scotch
Tape of presentation software, as a “PowerPoint” has come to mean any presentation created with software.

The groundwork for that invasion had been laid the previous decade, in the 1970s technosocial vision of the “office of the future.” It started,
like so much of what we now take for granted in our contemporary world of networked personal computing, at Xerox’s legendary Palo Alto
Research Center (PARC). The site was established in 1970 to invent the computing systems that would equip the future’s white-collar office,
an arena the company hoped to dominate in the same way it did photocopying. In 1972, PARC researchers began to focus on a new
personal computer they called the Alto. They were captivated by an extraordinary idea: that in the office of the future, every individual would
have a dedicated computer like the Alto.

While such innovations were ostensibly proprietary, by the end of the 1970s, Xerox managers and PARC staff were routinely discussing
their findings with outsiders and publishing details of the Alto system in journals. PARC researchers were, after all, still part of the broader
ARPA community of computer scientists and engineers. Many visitors who saw the Alto system considered it transformative.

One such visitor was Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Following Xerox’s investment in Apple in 1979, PARC researchers gave Apple engineers
and management detailed demonstrations of programs previously reserved for Xerox insiders. Jobs was so enthralled by what he saw that
he decided to reorient the Lisa, a business computer Apple was developing at the time, to fully embrace the PARC idiom. A few years later,
when Jobs was transferred out of the Lisa project, he seized control of another effort aimed at creating a low-cost computer and pushed it,
too, toward the PARC idiom. That computer became the Macintosh.

Apple lavished resources – people and cash alike – to embrace the PARC
paradigm with the Lisa and the Macintosh, but not everyone at Apple was happy
about that. By 1982, a small group had enough, quit and went into business
together, founding a company named Forethought that would eventually create
PowerPoint.

Forethought’s founders intended to work on Foundation, which was object-

oriented programming. They ran into difficulties, such as which personal
computers, if any, would be powerful enough to run their programming. The
Macintosh could, but it was expensive and falling in sales compared to the "new"
PC from IBM. Work on Foundation was set aside, while the firm focused on
software publishing (manufacturing, marketing, and supporting computer
programs written by others). Forethought’s publishing arm produced software for
the Apple Macintosh under the brand Macware, and it was a success. Object-
oriented programming has since become the prevailing paradigm for the most
widely used programming languages.

Forethought began to develop a new software product of its own. They spotted an opportunity in presentation software and believed they
could apply the PARC idiom to this application. He envisioned the user creating slides of text and graphics in a graphical, WYSIWYG
environment, then outputting them to 35-mm slides, overhead transparencies, or video displays and projectors, and also sharing them
electronically through networks and electronic mail. The presentation would spring directly from the mind of the business user, without
having to first transit through the corporate art department.

In April 1987, Forethought introduced its new presentation program to the market very much as it had been conceived, called PowerPoint
1.0, and it was a proverbial overnight success with Macintosh users. In the first month, Forethought booked $1 million in sales of
PowerPoint, at a net profit of $400,000, which was about what the company had spent developing it. And just over three months after
PowerPoint’s introduction, Microsoft purchased Forethought outright for $14 million in cash.

PowerPoint then became Microsoft’s presentation software, first just for the Macintosh and later also for Windows. The Forethought team
became Microsoft’s Graphics Business Unit. While PowerPoint was a success from the start, it nevertheless faced stiff competition, and for
several years, Lotus Freelance and Software Publishing’s Harvard Graphics commanded larger market shares. The tipping point for
PowerPoint came in 1990, when Microsoft unleashed its bundling strategy and began selling Microsoft Office – which combined Microsoft
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – as a $1,000 set. Previously, each part had been sold separately for about $500 apiece. Because most users
of personal computers required both a word processor and a spreadsheet program, Microsoft’s price for Office proved compelling.
PowerPoint’s competitors, on the other hand, resented the tactic as giving away PowerPoint for free. And for more than a quarter century,
Microsoft’s competitive logic proved unassailable.

These days, the business software market is shifting again, and Microsoft Office must now compete with similar bundles that are entirely
free, from the likes of Google, LibreOffice, and others. Productivity software resides more often than not in the cloud, rather than on the
user’s device. Meanwhile, the dominant mode of personal computing globally has firmly shifted from the desktop and laptop to the
smartphone. As yet, no new vision of personal computing like the one that came from Xerox PARC in the 1970s has emerged. And so for
the moment, it appears that PowerPoint, as we know it, is here to stay.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/the-improbable-origins-of-powerpoint