Nah, Excel was a huge product long before Microsoft was The Dominator.

What?

Excel, like the entirety of the titles in the Office Suite, was originally developed on the Mac - where it was hardly used since the Mac wasn't targeted to business at the time. Excel was ported to Windows 2.0, but like the Mac, hardly any business was using that. In the 1980's business ran on Lotus 123, not Excel.

All that changed after the release of Windows 3.0, but by that time Microsoft was already "The Dominator" as you put it. Excel 3.0 was released for Windows, Lotus took way too long to come up with a Windows release and Excel, with its GUI, had come to dominate the market. The rest is history, as they say.

I believe there was some skullduggery where M$ encouraged Wordperfect and Lotus, who dominated their markets, to focus on OS/2 as the future, while preparing to release or further promote Excel and Word for Windows with the release of Windows 3.0. (and possibly sabotaging the OS/2 effort). They also started the practice of bundling them up as "Office" which made Powerpoint a freebie, thus killing the market for presentation programs that had had competition at the time. I worked in an Egghead Software store while all this was going on.

I do know Microsoft lied and led everybody to believe they were completely on-board with OS/2 and were touting their codeveloping relationship with IBM. It was totally believable since Microsoft and IBM were joined at the hip with the PC and DOS.

Later we found out that while Microsoft was saying one thing in industry press releases and conferences, they were preparing Windows 3.0. I've never trusted that company since, and they've never failed to meet my low expectations of them.

Thing is, I remember a very different Microsoft. They used to be a great company. Then they made a deal with the devil in the 1987 timeframe and they've been evil ever since.

As with a good chunk of MS's desktop dominance, a big factor was Lotus' inability or unwillingness to embrace the common interface in Windows (what we now think of as standard menus for File/Edit/etc).

Lotus had its own proprietary menu structure generally invoked with slash. ALL programs did when Lotus was introduced. Its partisans made it hard for Lotus to abandon it, but its failure to shift into the new reality meant the oodles of new people flocking to computing as Windows exploded went to Excel by default, because 1-2-3 was impenetrable.

Word vs. WordPerfect played out in much the same way.

In both cases the MSFT offering was, in many ways, superior, but a key piece of it was the legacy player's refusal to adjust to the common menus Windows users expected.

There was also the plethora of undocumented Windows API's the Office programs were using that weren't available to anybody else. That was one of the thrusts of the antitrust lawsuit leveled against Microsoft. The best thing coming out of that was Microsoft's $150 million investment into Apple in an attempt to convince the government that they had competition and weren't a monopoly. Apple had 2% of the marketshare at the time - some competitor!

Also, there was the bundling and OEM backroom deals.

That was mostly (exclusively?) Windows, though, not Office.

It was Office + Works, and other strategic assets.

I do not believe any bundling or OEM deals were material factors in Office's success beyond the fact that exactly those deals helped establish and preserve WINDOWS' hegemony.

Ok. I do belive it. You have that entirely backwards. The Windows monopoly was leverage they used to push out competing applications. From the DOJ's proposed finding of fact (https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-proposed-findings...)

"208.3. Microsoft's unresponsiveness and its actions to delay the Windows 95 license negotiations with IBM followed soon after IBM announced that it was seeking to acquire Lotus Development Corp., a direct competitor of Microsoft in messaging and office suite software, among other products.

IBM announced on June 5, 1995 a hostile takeover attempt of Lotus. On June 11, IBM and Lotus reached an agreement for IBM to acquire Lotus. IBM completed the acquisition on approximately July 5, 1995. Norris, 6/7/99am, at 35:9 - 36:12. Among other products, Lotus offered Lotus Notes, an e-mail product, and Lotus SmartSuite, an office productivity suite, that competed with Microsoft's software. Norris, 6/7/99am, at 35:21 - 36:5."

"Microsoft repeatedly penalized IBM for competing against Microsoft

Microsoft withheld a Windows 95 license from IBM until 15 minutes before the product's launch because of IBM's preloading of competing products Microsoft conditioned access to critical marketing support, and other terms and conditions for Windows provided to other OEMs, on IBM's not preloading competing products with the PCs it shipped Microsoft sought to condition substantial MDA price reductions on IBM's ceasing to support competing products

Search for "quicktime" for more joy.

But all that is still small change compared to the deals forcing OEMs to bundle a license for Windows with every PC sold.

Other than Office, sure? (Office is has long been one of their main cash cows. Is part of why they wanted to keep it on Mac, which is pointedly not Windows). It's also irrelevant. The point was that they used the pricing of Windows (which the OEMs) and withholding information about Windows to force OEMs to bundle Office/Works instead of competitors.

That they did it is clear. Whether they did it for simple profit (Office/Works) or to further enhance the moat around Windows (Java, QuickTime). They did it using Windows as both carrot and stick, to gain compliance. Because OEMs had no other choice.

Whether or not they abused their position to get there is orthogonal to the question of it being malware.

It is undeniable that Excel has provided massive value for end users and been massively empowering for them.

Whether or not Microsoft software is malware is a different question that if Microsoft is a good or bad company.

Excel is pretty bad example of that. Microsoft did abused position, especially with its browser. But excel was actually genuinely successful.

There are a lot of things which are shitty about Excel but for the user it's a great program and how much better it is than Google Sheets is a great demonstration.

I think building a good spreadsheet program that is both accessible and powerful is very difficult. Excel might be the most non-trivially used "programming language" in the world.

It successful by same reasons as well known flavoured sugar water, child friendly high calories processed fast food chain and tabloids. They sold lies.

That is not true, Excel is a great platform for smart non-programming type people to do interesting stuff with numbers. I often find that instead of building a reporting function into some new system, just generating a spreadsheet generator that people can take and mess around with is better for them and less work for me. There's some issues that the stats people don't like, and like all compatibility-preserving 30 year old software, there are ugly bits, but it's got real value to it. I mean maybe use OpenOffice or Google docs or whatever instead if you find Oracle or Google better than Microsoft, but spread sheets are valuable to users.

I'm sorry, but that's absolute twaddle.

Excel is genuinely excellent. I was as big a MSFT-hater in the 90s as you are likely to be able to find, but credit where credit is due: Excel provides a level of data analysis power to a lay user that is just not available elsewhere.

Sure, tech people (cough HN readers cough) often want to trot out arguments about how "well, that sort of stuff just shouldn't be done in Excel! They should learn to use R or SQL or some other $MoreCorrectTool". That's poppycock. Excel is already on the analyst's desk. It's immensely powerful while ALSO being very accessible. Nothing else comes close.

No. And frankly, only people lying here were those who claimed open office spreadsheet is equal about a day it came out despite it being significantly worst.

Excel was just better by miles.