Others also recognized this (Borland / WordPerfect aligning, and WordPerfect’s strategy was “we interact with other industry leading applications” (like 1-2-3) way before the days of Windows) but they failed to execute for other reasons, so it wasn’t like Microsoft figured out something else others didn’t. They used their first mover advantage and control of the platform to outmaneuver the competition.
WordPerfect couldn't even work well with itself and bungled the transition from DOS to GUI hard. Word's biggest advantage was that it worked great on Windows, while WordPerfect had to tiptoe around offending their existing DOS experts.
History repeats itself in office suites (or at least rhymes) - the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful.
One of the problems was that most companies where developing OS/2 version of their apps, as Microsoft had promised that was the future, while Microsoft was building Windows apps. By the time they realized their mistake, it was already too late.
I still remember how many minutes it took to boot WordPerfect on the schools 486DX2 66Mhz ... I could time it to play a round of doom on another machine next to it.
I'm guessing that was loading over the LAN, as that's the only time I recall seeing multi-minute load times on a DX2. In that scenario, the speed of the computer was largely irrelevant, as files were being pulled from a NetWare server (reading files of very slow spinning disks) over a 10Mb shared media ethernet network.
> the modern version of folks offended that the GUI version broke keyboard shortcuts are people convinced that because they managed to find things in the cluttered confusing menus, the ribbon must be awful
To be fair, the real "competition" that the Ribbon displaced wasn't just menus, it was toolbars. Yes, the toolbar sections were arbitrary, but so were ribbon sections. Massive amounts of cheese moved, causing lots of confusion, and it also took way more screen real-estate. In Office, it was a net loss IMO.
In the File Explorer, the ribbon was a disaster, in practice if not necessarily in theory.
I wasn't offended by the switch, but it definitely felt like an unforced error.
I am a slow typist, and I found that I could get ahead of WordPerfect 6 on Windows 95. Truly good typists must have found this to be a problem. I'm not sure how otherwise the 5.1 diehards were offended, though.
The only thing they gave away for free was a PowerPoint viewer software. Same with Word and Excel.
These are multi-billion dollar product lines, why would MS ever give them away for free? If you received it without paying, you likely bought a PC with Office bundled in. Somebody paid for it one way or another.
Mobile is a different business model, as people are used to paying nothing or very little for apps. It's similar to what used to be called "shareware" or 'trialware' back in the day -- apps with a restricted set of features, designed to entice you into buying the full thing.
Wait, Microsoft used to bundle Office for free with windows? When did that happen? (I'm pretty unfamiliar with pre-2010 Microsoft so I'm genuinely wondering!)
I vaguely recall that in the Windows 3.11 days there was a cut down version of Office (might have been called something else?) which was either free or at least frequently bundled with new PCs in the same way that Windows was.
I can’t find anything online that discusses this though. Most articles seem to talk about recent versions of Office (last 10 or 15 years) but the version I’m thinking of would have been pre-95.
I seem to remember Works was around £80, office 4.3 was around £400.
In reality whatever you had at work was free as you just brought the floppies home and installed it, which led to a generation of people being brought up on Microsoft products.
There was Microsoft Write ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Write ) but Word/Office was NEVER bundled with Windows. I used Microsoft products from MS-DOS 5 to Windows 7, and that never happened.
Likewise (well a slightly earlier version of DOS since that’s what my high school ran on their ring token coax network, plus some (by that time) old college stand alones that you had to run something like ‘park’ to park the HDD head before powering off). In fact I’m pretty sure I’d written some of my course work in Word for DOS too. Feels like a life time ago now.
Anyhow, there definitely was an office suite (lower case O) that was bundled with some PCs. But as another HNer points out it was Microsoft Works rather than Microsoft Office.
With Windows, no. But many, many computers were sold with Office bundled in through the 2000s. It's how my family got Office and how I think most consumer-side people did.
ie. As a CIO, I can go buy a suite of products that work together well. This is what Microsoft recognized - the bundle and integration was the key.