Microsoft "hadn't invented the spreadsheet" in 1989

THERE'S A DEBATE on the pages of the Wall Street Journal between technical evangelist Robert Scoble of His Voleness and a long time Microsoft critic, David Winer, which has some curiousities in there.

The debate is about "innovation" with Scoble reckoning the Vole is, and Winer saying the Vole ain't.

But the real curiousity is when Scoble reckons that in 1989 Apple was "6,000 miles ahead of Microsoft in the OS race", and Microsoft hadn't "invented the word processor, or the spreadsheet or the database program". Scoble also reckons in the piece that Microsoft realised it was a bit behind on the web front "five years ago" - er, surely shome mishtake, sir.

Of course, leaving aside the word "invention", because the first spreadsheet, as the world+dog knows, was Visicalc for the Apple, and written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, and released in 1979, the world+dog also knows that Microsoft launched Excel for PCs in 1987, while it already had been flogging Word for DOS for a good while already. As well as other stuff. Heck, I was at the 1987 launch of Excel for the PC, down at Claridges, as I recall.

Then there were its other offerings such as the incredibly weird spreadsheet Multiplan, while some would argue that IBM and Microsoft's OS/2 was way ahead on the operating system that Apple had right then.

You might not want to believe this, but we're still using Microsoft Word version 2.0b, which has as its copyright mark, version 2.0b, "copyright 1989-1992". Heck, it's very fast these days indeed. Can't remember which chip we were running it on then, but it was pretty fast then, too. Pity it didn't have a word count then, but hey, in these days of the World Wide Web, who's counting?

There's more of this delightful tommyrot, here. (sub required). µ

L'INQ
Scoble bog