Microsoft celebrates 25 years of the software suite.
Microsoft quietly celebrated the 25th anniversary of their Office suite on 1 August 2014 but were they being a little ‘previous’ in their celebrations?
While Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Windows were around on 1 August 1989, were they sold as ‘Microsoft Office’ or only as separate products?
Office Watch’s collective recollection is that the marketing of a bundle of the products (Word, Excel and PowerPoint etc.) didn’t start until ‘Office 4’ in 1994 and then in earnest with the release of Windows 95 and the matching Office 95 in August 1995.
Though Wikipedia and Microsoft say otherwise.
Mind you, some of the people who came up with the idea of this ‘celebration’ or marketing exercise probably weren’t even born in 1989
Peter remembers driving to a software store to buy the original Word for Windows as shrink-wrapped software in a blue and white box. The many floppy disks included a copy of Windows as well. Younger readers can lookup obsolete terms like ‘software store’ ‘shrink-wrapped software’ and especially ‘floppy disks’.
