Well actually spreadsheets were Dan Bricklin’s idea when he was at Harvard...remember VisiCalc? Ended up Lotus 1-2-3. PARC didn’t really have any analogous idea, they were more about the GUI and Object Oriented programming.
MS had Multiplan which was boring but they copied 1-2-3 to put on the MAC platform in ‘85 IIRC and then used their hardware sales growth to burn down Lotus. Excel was never the market leader until the early ‘90s.
As for word processors, I really think they did a creditable job there. Remember Apple used to bundle MacWrite with the early Macs, and MS came up with Word for Mac. They read the Mac Programmers standard book end to end and did a fabulous job of adhering to it, and I honestly think that doing that is where they learned to do GUI’s. It showed in everything they did after that.
It was essentially a better version of MacWrite. You could say that came from Xerox since PARC really did come up with that concept and Jobs stole the idea. But MS just worked off the Apple template to come up with Word. It’s not a criticism, that was a great product.
It’s funny. Back in the ‘70s we shared code all the time over the old ARPA net. Nobody thought code was anything worth selling. I remember when Gates wrote the article castigating people for doing that. We all thought he was a jerk for writing it. Stallman got mad and wrote the CopyLeft to try to prevent him from monopolizing the world and realeased GNU to start that ball rolling. And of course Torvaldis went one step further with Linux, again to undermine Bad Bill. But they haven’t been that successful in burning down the MS universe...only Apple.
It’s hard to say what’s “stealing” versus just “competing”, but it’s pretty clear that MS never came up with a paradigm product on their own, they just produced/bought copies and then used platform dominance to make product dominance.
Gates and his family just used Ruling Class connections to make that happen.
You’re focused on individual weeds and not the historical picture.
What happened in the ARPA net days is irrelevant as it proceeded the positioning of those that were set up to dominate.
The tools that were were FTP’d around came with legal protections which were ignored. That’s called piracy.
Gates stole the tools and had Allen adapt them. Gates was not the visionary. He had others around him put together popular user experiences. The point is any number of talkers could have CEO’d others into doing the same thing as Gates. He was nothing special, not even unique except he grew up in a family of Eugenicists who think your life should be snuffed.
The point is that lionizing clowns like Bezos and Gates is an insult to history and intelligence, and perpetuates the danger posed by these monsters..
One might as well conclude a certain megalomaniac and child rapist was a promising poet and possibly a visionary urban planner. The person in mind was actually all four.
Bezos is linked and bound by the Davos gang of Satan Worshippers.
Gates spiritual Advisor is Marina Abramowitz, a Satan worshiper.
But go ahead and talk ARPA net, and all the yesteryears of tech BS, as if that is somehow relevant.
What’s relevant are the monsters allowed to run rampant today and how they should not be allowed to be falsely described and celebrated through their PR minions.
Jeff Bezos: Visionary ..... Barf
Joe Biden: 81 million votes ..... Barf