Adobe Persuasion
~ the goodbye ~
adobe persuasion died one year before i got my first modem. anyway, it was discontinued in september '97. my first dial-up account on ttnet came online in '98. so this is a grave i write from a textbook (close enough), about a product i never opened, in a category i first met through powerpoint on a school lab computer in around '99 or '00.
persuasion was a presentation program first released by aldus corporation in november '88 for the macintosh. the original pitch was that you wrote your slides as an outline first. the outline tree and the slide deck stayed in sync as you edited either side. anyone who has fought with powerpoint's outline pane knows the bones of what persuasion shipped first.
aldus had pagemaker on the same shelf, the dominant desktop-publishing app of the late '80s. it made enough money for aldus to fund persuasion as a second pillar. a windows port shipped in the early '90s. adobe acquired aldus in summer '94 and picked up persuasion as part of the deal. version 4.0 in '96 was the last release. honestly, by then microsoft had bundled powerpoint into office and the standalone presentation market had effectively closed. adobe pulled the plug a year later.
~ the chronicle ~
| Born | November 1988 on the Macintosh, by Aldus Corporation |
|---|---|
| Peak | early 1990s, briefly a serious Mac presentation rival to PowerPoint |
| Killed | September 1997, at version 4.0 |
| Lifespan | almost 9 years |
| Made by | Aldus Corporation, then Adobe Systems after the 1994 merger |
| Killed by | Microsoft PowerPoint and the Office bundling model |
~ what it was ~
the outline-first editing model was persuasion's actual contribution. you opened a new file, started typing topics and sub-topics in a text tree, and the slide deck built itself from the structure (or whatever it was called). you could flip into slide view at any point to lay things out spatially. this kind of two-way binding between outline and slides was an obvious idea once you saw it, but persuasion shipped it years before powerpoint copied it. powerpoint folded the same outline pane into version 3.0 in '92.
~ the inheritance ~
the outline pane in powerpoint and keynote both descend from persuasion's bet that a slide deck is a text tree first. nobody uses persuasion files anymore, the format quietly died after '97 with no migration path beyond opening old decks in keynote or powerpoint and rebuilding by hand. pagemaker, the other aldus product adobe inherited, lasted longer and morphed into indesign. persuasion just got buried.
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other software: Nebula, Inc., Hypertable, Antergos, Viaweb
also died in the 1990s: Media Vision, Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh, Viaweb
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