Sweating Bullets
PowerPoint was the first presentation software designed for Macintosh and Windows, received the first venture capital investment ever made by Apple, and then became the first significant acquisition ever made by Microsoft, who set up a new Graphics Business Unit in Silicon Valley to develop it further. Now, twenty-five years later, PowerPoint is installed on over one billion computers worldwide. In this book, Robert Gaskins (who invented the idea, managed its design and development, and then headed the new Microsoft group) tells the story of its first years, recounting the perils and disasters narrowly evaded as a startup, dissecting the complexities of being the first distant development group in Microsoft, and explaining decisions and insights that enabled PowerPoint to become a lasting success well beyond its original business uses.
Stats for nerds
8recommend
13mentions
10people
2017–2025years
77% recommend23% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I find reading books about how people did hard things to be very motivating and therapeutic, especially when facing a difficult task myself! I’ve enjoyed all of these; they were all recommendations from HN.
Showstopper - Windows NT
Losing the Signal - BlackBerry
Made in Japan - Sony
Piloting Palm - Palm
Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint
Folklore.org - Early Apple.
The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating and solving challenges.
- In "Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint" PowerPoint creator Robert Gaskins tells how he designed and developed the most famous slide presentation application. The book is available at the author's site: https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
- If you’re interested in more on this, I highly recommend the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins, the inventor/PM of PowerPoint.
- If you want to read about the development of PowerPoint by its visionary, you can checkout the book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins:
Dennis Austin was the lead developer and Gaskins was the idea guy/manager.
- "Sweating Bullets", "Almost Perfect" (http://www.wordplace.com/ap/), "The Autodesk File" (https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/) and "Show Stopper!" were a few books that I think pair very well, and as a developer who wasn't around in the time really gave interesting and comparable insights into the development of a few really important companies and pieces of software.
- A great book on this topic is Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins, the inventor of PowerPoint. It's amazing how little the core of that program has changed since it was first introduced.
