Visicalc was first, but I think it was Lotus 123 that really made spreadsheets popular; it was absolutely huge back in the day.

Yes. Excel took a long time to topple Lotus 123, but Lotus's failure to move to a GUI quickly enough saw Excel win.

DOS Microsoft Word was before Excel I think.

It was a similar story with Word Perfect, their failure to move to a GUI basically handed MS Word market dominance. Their belated port of the DOS UI was very awkward at first, and the move to 32-bit in 95 was the final straw.

The "original" Word, before Windows, was available for DOS and Xenix - I actually saw some systems using Word on Xenix in '88.

I've actually used MS Word on Windows 1.0 (around 1985ish I think).

It was .... well, basically unusably horrible. As you typed, it would swap stuff in/out from floppy disk; as you might imagine, this made even just entering text an excruciating experience.

Luckily for MS, systems eventually got more memory and hard disks...

The time I saw MS Word deployed on a Xenix box it didn't work terribly well - was fine on the system console but was barely usable on serial terminals as the make of terminals (Wyse something or other) had Alt keys which did nothing. And, as far as I recall, the Alt key was pretty important in Word.

Of course, this wasn't Microsoft's fault - rather the idiotic salesman who had sold all of this without checking with anyone whether it would work or not.

I think Quattro was the #2 (behind Lotus) for a while - ahead of Excel. Borland just seemed to have an uncanny talent for running products into the ground.

Borland certainly did, but they also had plenty of bad luck.

Just as they were getting close to finishing Quattro Pro, their head offices were hit by the 1989 World Series Earthquake (they were very close to the epicenter).

Apparently, many of their computers survived the earthquake itself but were rained on by the damaged sprinkler system and covered in mushy ceiling tile debris. They commandeered a tennis court to try to dry off, clean and revive as many of the computers as they could

They did end up releasing Quattro Pro, but then were soon sued by Lotus.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland

Reminds me of their word processor Sprint. Quite a fancy product of its time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(word_processor)

Lets reverse your last point: when MS releases Office for Surface, iOS is dead in business.

If they hit that mythical $199 price point which is rumored (unlikely) and it ships with Office RT, then there is no better tablet proposition out there.

Windows Phone leper colony reporting in. I got a bright idea to take a spreadsheet that I use for tracking my workouts and uploading it to skydrive so that I could punch my workout in after I finished. It turns out the mobile version of Excel doesnt support a number of formulas and macros like the desktop version does. I think i read that Excel for Office on RT will have the same limitations. I will probably end up getting the ultrabook version of Surface (sans keyboard) for this reason and for pen input for OneNote.

There are a ton of people out there who used to think they needed office, and have been using iOS happily without it. Microsoft made a huge mistake not releasing Office for iOS as soon as they could -- these people would all have bought it and remained convinced it was indispensable.

Now, most of them won't care (and probably figured out that Office wasn't actually very good at its core functionality, like word-processing and creating presentations, compared to cheaper, easier-to-use alternatives). In any event, the strangehold MS had over the enterprise where even people who didn't want Windows were forced to use it, is broken.

So... dream on.

I definitely prefer Google Docs for presentation creating and non-reference heavy word processing, but I find spreadsheets is where Google Docs comes up short compared to Microsoft's product.

I get the feeling you've never used Office for anything serious?

I think the parent commenter was merely stating that a large portion of Office users realize that what they're doing isn't "serious" - despite it being critical to their uses, it's something that doesn't require the full power of a desktop Office suite (and thus can be done without Microsoft).

Fact is, even Surface won't be as mobile as something that fits in your pocket - and I seriously doubt Microsoft can or even wants to make (perhaps a stripped down) Office into a $10 smartphone app.

Office should run pretty much unmodified on the Surface Pro. What happens on the Surface RT is a somewhat more interesting question though.

It's all documented here:

http://blogs.office.com/b/office-next/archive/2012/09/13/bui...

I don't think MS needs to lower the price that much for businesses, given that a full licence of Office probably costs about that. Checks website, oh it's $499 for 1 user, 2PCs (obviously bulk discounts will be massive, but still).

No it's $199.99 for one user one pc or for two PCs, one user $279.99:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-business/

(It's $499 if you want access and publisher but most people don't)

USD $199 is currently about GBP £122. We have VAT added at 20%, which makes the cost almost £150. GBP price is £190 (1 install, 2 is £240).

Guess this is when you get a VPN.

I'm interested how exhaustion of rights works in these situations can one of you [hypothetically] purchase the download for me and resell it to me in the UK?

If you transfer it first to your UK server then presumably there would be no import duty or VAT to pay as it's a personal transaction?

You can just buy an OEM copy here. It's cheaper. Just buy a USB stick with it for £1 and you get it for £159 without all the hassle.

Office is significantly lower than $499 or even $199 for PC's under their normal business licensing arrangements. Less than $50 for most larger businesses.

For most of those people, it's simply the only software they're moderately competent with. If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I wonder how much Excel has ended up shaping our world because of the point of view it implies.

Yup... I used to have a boss who was a linguist by trade, who used Excel as his general-purpose programming language of choice, simply because it's what he knew the best.

He was pretty good at it, so the stuff generally more or less worked fine, but it was a constant source of amusement for everybody else...

Quantrix is used a great deal in finance, and I have the impression that it is used more than Excel by people who need to have confidence that their financial models are correct.

I wasn't precise enough, I meant financial departments within companies of all areas. Finance as in banking of course has its special tools - but I would be surprised if Excel is not used for anything quick and dirty.

MS Excel is not precise enough in a lot of areas, you can't compare it to something like SPSS for statistics for example - but it's good enough.