25 year of office software

 By Simon Williams

From the days of WordStar and VisiCalc, office applications have become more and more important to the way in which businesses are run. Simon Williams explains how and why.

HardCopy Issue: 40 | Found In: Business | Published: 01/05/2008 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

As you sit at your word processor or type another number into your spreadsheet, it’s hard to imagine a time when these everyday tools weren’t available. Yet, back in 1983, when Grey Matter was just starting up, both these applications were text-based, included no colour and involved learning all kinds of arcane keyboard commands to get them to do anything. And if you wanted to give a business presentation, you’d need an overhead projector or a carousel of slides. The history of office software is one of lucky breaks and bad bets, where one company wins out over another because of a better set of function key assignments or because they backed the right graphical user interface. Through all that, though, the same three core applications have stood the test of time. They may have been improved greatly over the years, but the ability to create and edit typed documents, calculate mathematical results and present your ideas to a group of colleagues are still fundamental. Let’s look at the history of the office suite, starting with the first instances of those three early applications on the Mac and the PC – and it’s surprising how many of them started life on the Mac.

Put it in writing

Word processing software grew out of the earlier development of dedicated word- processing machines and electric typewriters, such as IBM’s Selectric, that could save documents for later recall. The earliest of these was WordStar, originally created in 1978 for use on CP/M-based machines. It was ported to DOS in 1981, though at that stage it was still limited to the 64k memory limit set by CP/M. WordStar held the major share of the market through the mid-1980s although rival programs like MultiMate, designed for typists used to Wang’s dedicated word processors, and XYWrite had reasonable market share.

The introduction of WordPerfect 2.2 to the PC in 1982, from its earlier incarnation on Data General minicomputers, gave WordStar a direct competitor and caused a split in the WordStar camp over the direction its product should take. WordStar 2000 was a version that used WordPerfect keyboard sequences but this was never as popular as WordStar hoped. WordPerfect 4.2 saw sales outstrip WordStar’s for the first time, in part due to useful features like automatic paragraph numbering and extended footnotes, both important in legal and academic markets. Microsoft Word was launched in 1983 as a DOS-based word processor, though it wasn’t initially well received, partly because of yet another set of keyboard shortcuts that differed from both WordStar and WordPerfect. It’s history in Xerox PARC, where it was called Multi-Tool Word, meant it was the first serious attempt at WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get, for the younger reader) with bold and italic showing on-screen rather than indicated through colour highlights. It was also the first word processor to work with a mouse, and indeed one was bundled with early versions of the program.

Working the numbers

VisiCalc has been credited with single-handedly giving the PC a reason to be. This was the first spreadsheet, written back in 1979 in 6502 assembler for the Apple II computer by Ben Frankston, from a concept devised by Dan Bricklin. Although basic in function by today’s standards, the principles of automatic calculation and tools like replication of formulae were there in the first version of the program.

The interface may look simple but VisiCalc was useful enough to become the first, and best-known, 'killer application' to appear on the personal computer.

The concept of the spreadsheet was never patented by Bricklin and Frankston, because at the time, software was very hard to patent. The pair were given a 10 per cent chance of one being granted, so never pursued it. By the time legal precedents had been set for software patents, VisiCalc had been around too long to be new and novel. Mainly due to this lack of patent protection, rival spreadsheets popped up soon after VisiCalc with programs like SuperCalc, MultiPlan and Lotus 1-2-3 all in place by 1983. Interestingly, Excel was first released on the Macintosh in 1985 and not for the PC until a Windows 2.0 version in 1987. Although 700,000 copies of VisiCalc were sold in the first six years of its existence, Lotus exceeded that and racked up $53 million in its first year of operation, selling pretty much only 1-2-3. It also spurred sales of the IBM PC into business and for a while was regarded as a benchmark for testing IBM PC compatibility. The undoing of Lotus started with Microsoft’s introduction of Excel, but was specifically because Lotus backed IBM’s OS/2 rather than Microsoft Windows as the future of operating systems. Excel was in the winning team and Lotus 1-2-3, ironically now owned by IBM, hasn’t seen a new release since 2002. Excel didn’t reach the PC until version 2.05 in 1987 when it was bundled with a runtime version of Windows. It superseded Multiplan, Microsoft’s first spreadsheet, which lost out to Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC. It’s success is very much tied up with the adoption of Windows as the leading graphical operating system – there was never a character-based version of the program.

Presenting the results

The third element of the core office suite trio is the presentation graphics editor. Designed to make electronic slide presentations easier, these programs started life rather later than the other two components.

1986 saw the launch of Harvard Presentation Graphics, one of the first presentation graphics applications on the PC which could integrate text with graphs and charts, and with imported graphics and photos as clipart. Harvard was the undisputed leader in DOS-based presentation graphics but, as with word processing and spreadsheets, things changed as Windows took over – UK-based Serif now has exclusive marketing rights for all Harvard Graphics software, though little is sold. The other main player is of course PowerPoint. Originally written by a company called Forethought and released in 1987, again for the Macintosh, it was bought in the same year by Microsoft but not released in a Windows version until 1990. PowerPoint has never really had much competition in the Windows market, although Lotus Freelance was popular in the mid-1990s. The mid-1990s also saw the launch of the first digital projectors and they soon started to be the equipment of choice for business presentations. Before that, computer-generated ‘slides’ would be converted into just that: 35mm transparencies that were loaded into traditional slide projectors for presentation. The introduction of features now considered standard, such as slide transitions and point-by-point animation, was made possible by digital projectors, as was the curse of ‘Death by PowerPoint’ although long and dull presentations reflect on the presenter rather than the tool of choice.

Bringing it all together

While word processors and spreadsheets were reasonably commonplace when Grey Matter started trading, putting them together with presentation graphics applications and integrating them so they could share data was still to come. The evolution of the office suite was to change the way word processors, spreadsheets and presentation graphics applications were marketed, until some of them would stop being sold as standalone programs altogether. The first of the major office suites was Lotus Symphony, launched in 1984 as a combination of spreadsheet, word processor, a graphing program, a form-based database manager and a communications program. Symphony was clever in that it held all information in a common core so that the different applications effectively became different ways of looking at the same data. Even though Symphony was a character-based program, it could open separate windows onto this data and show them on screen at the same time. Symphony’s spreadsheet module rivalled Lotus’s market-leading 1-2-3 but it had a weak database and an even weaker word processor – little better than a text editor – so was never going to provide all a business customer would need. IBM, which now owns Lotus, introduced a new version of Symphony in 2007 based on the OpenOffice.org suite. The first two versions of Microsoft Office were available only on the Mac and it wasn’t until the end of 1992 that Office 3.0 appeared on the PC. Released in two versions, the Standard edition contained Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Mail while the Professional edition added the Access database. The applications, even at this time, were reasonably well balanced in their feature-sets and this is what made it difficult for rivals to compete. WordPerfect was still arguably stronger than Word – though WordPerfect Corporation had a lot of trouble with its Windows conversion – but the main problem was not having a decent spreadsheet to go up against Excel. Kind of handy, then, that Borland – best known for its Turbo Pascal language software – had a strong spreadsheet in the shape of Quattro Pro (unusually, written in Modula 2), a good database in the form of Paradox, but no word processor to speak of. A marketing agreement saw the release of Borland Office for Windows in 1993 which partnered these two with WordPerfect for Windows.

WordPerfect only stayed with Novell for a couple of years before Corel bought it and released the WordPerfect Suite in 1996.

For a while, Borland Office for Windows was a challenger to Microsoft Office, but by the time Novell bought WordPerfect in 1994 and Quattro Pro and Paradox from Borland, putting together Novell WordPerfect Suite, Microsoft pretty much had the market sewn up. Novell sold WordPerfect along with the spreadsheet and database to Corel just two years later and, for all Corel’s woes in the intervening years, the Canadian company continued to develop the same suite of applications and still sells it today, although focused on its core legal and academic markets. Microsoft must have thought it was in the clear by the late 1990s when it had a much larger share of the office suite market than any other company, and those that were left were dying. However, a new rival, or more accurately a set of closely related rivals, was about to spring up.

The open approach

A little-known German company called StarDivision developed the StarOffice suite in the mid to late 1990s, but it wasn’t until the program was bought by Sun Microsystems in 1999 and version 5.2 of it made available free of charge, that it started to make waves. Later in 2000, Sun made the source code of StarOffice available for download with the explicit intention of developing an Open Source community around the program. Due to a previous trademark, the project and the software are both known as OpenOffice.org and version 2 was released in 2005, following a two-year development cycle. Sun continues to use the revised OpenOffice.org source code, with proprietary extensions of its own, as the basis for its StarOffice suite. OpenOffice.org 2.4 is the current version and includes close file compatibility with Microsoft Office. It doesn’t directly support the Office Open XML format introduced with Microsoft Office 2007 although there is an integrated tranlator available. It has five main components, Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw and Base, which are self-explanatory except that Draw is a Visio-like drawing and diagramming package and Base is a database reporter which works with a wide variety of data sets. The danger for Microsoft is that the Open Source package is free. This has led to a number of companies, schools and government bodies around the world adopting the software throughout their organisations. Microsoft may argue that the level of support is not as high as with Microsoft Office, but this is to some extent countered by the Open Source community producing corrected code

Playing the system

With an effectively free alternative to Microsoft Office, the last couple of years has seen the world’s largest software company starting to talk about the Office System. It has been arguing to businesses in particular that Office is more than just the client applications in the Office suite as it also involves back-end technologies like SharePoint and Groove which are essential to the workflow and collaborative processes within and between businesses. By selling the concept of the Office System, Microsoft is highlighting the strength it has as a network and Intranet provider. This is something OpenOffice doesn’t have except, of course, that it does have the networking muscle of Sun behind it so most of the infrastructure, if not all the collaborative tools, are available to back up OpenOffice and StarOffice. Open/StarOffice also have the advantage of being cross-platform. There are versions of one or both of these suites for Windows, MacOS, Linux and Sun’s own Solaris operating system. Microsoft Office runs on Windows and Mac but not on the Unix variants.

Creating standards

The native file formats of Microsoft Office 2007 and OpenOffice have now both been accepted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as standard formats for the representation of documents. The Open Document Format (ODF) was the first to be accepted and is supported by OpenOffice.org, Google Docs, Zoho, IBM Lotus Symphony and others, but not by Microsoft Office (although a plug-in is being written).

Designed to be familiar to people who've used its Microsoft competitor, OpenOffice supports the Open Document Format (ODF) which, like Office Open XML, is and international standard.

The native file format for Office 2007 is known as Office Open XML and had only just been accepted as an ISO standard at the time of writing after considerable resistance from Microsoft’s competitors. So why do we need two standards for office file formats? This question has caused much debate, but essentially because they do actually serve different purposes. To quote the specification, OpenDocument “defines suitable XML structures for office documents and is friendly to transformation using XSLT or similar XML-based tools.” While the same is true of Office Open XML, Microsoft’s goal was to create a format that could encapsulate all the functionality of its Office software, right back to Office 2000. This is particularly important for the business community where Microsoft supplies over 90 per cent of office software as it means that nearly a decade’s worth of documents can be accurately represented in an industry standard format. Office 2007 will open documents created by Office 97 through to Office 2003 in a ‘compatibility’ mode, while a free Office File Converter is available for automatic batch conversion. The Office Compatibility Pack can be used with Office 2000 and above to work with Office Open XML files. However those using Office for Mac can still not directly open any of the new formats.

The introduction of the RIbbon to the interface of the main applications in Microsoft Office 2007 has met with a mixed response.

Office Open XML also supports a ‘relationships’ and ‘parts’ structure which allows programs to manipulate documents without parsing their content. This is particularly useful for workflow applications. A series of marketing mistakes by Microsoft’s rivals dating back to the early 1990s (principally not realising that Windows would be the predominant PC operating system) has left Microsoft Office with very little competition. With Open Source and WordPerfect Suite the only viable competitors, and both holding a very small proportion of overall office software sales, the days of a mixed and challenging market are perhaps gone.

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