Forethought, Inc.

~ the goodbye ~

Rob Campbell and Taylor Pohlman left Apple in early 1983 and started Forethought to build something called Foundation, an object-oriented environment for the IBM PC meant to let ordinary people assemble their own software out of parts. It never shipped. What the company had instead was money raised on the promise of Foundation and nothing to spend it against, which is the position most startups die in.

So it became a publisher. Forethought signed other people's Macintosh software and put its own name on the box, and one of those deals was FileMaker, written by Nashoba Systems and shipping in 1985. That paid the bills. In July 1984 the company hired Robert Gaskins to run product development, and Gaskins arrived with an idea he had already worked out on paper: the presentation, meaning the stack of overhead transparencies that every meeting in every company ran on, had no software of its own.

The program was called Presenter until a trademark problem forced the rename, and it shipped as PowerPoint 1.0 on 20 April 1987, Macintosh only, black and white, built around the LaserWriter because printing the slide was the entire point of it. Apple's own investment group had put money in, the first venture capital Apple ever wrote. Barely three months after the product reached customers, on 31 July 1987, Microsoft paid $14 million for the company. It was the first significant acquisition Microsoft had made, and the terms were unusual: the Forethought people stayed in California as a new Graphics Business Unit rather than moving to Redmond, and Gaskins ran that unit for another five years.

I have made presentations in PowerPoint since university and never once thought of it as a product with a birthplace. It arrived in Turkish computer labs as a component of Office, somewhere in the Office 97 and 2000 years, already ordinary enough to work as a verb. Nobody I studied with knew it had been written for a Macintosh by a company Microsoft bought when I was three. That is what a successful acquisition looks like from four decades downstream.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

Around ten thousand copies went out at the start, which was enough to make PowerPoint the leading Macintosh business application by revenue almost immediately. The reason is that it was not competing with anything. Companies made slides by writing on a legal pad, handing that to a graphics department, and waiting a week for transparencies to come back. Forethought collapsed the loop to an afternoon and one laser printer.

The Macintosh-first decision looks obvious now and was contested then. The IBM PC had the installed base and the corporate buyers, and the Mac had roughly nothing in a business setting. But the Mac had a bitmapped screen showing what would actually print, and it had the LaserWriter, so it was the only machine on which the product could exist at all. PowerPoint reached Windows in 1990, three years after the company that wrote it had stopped existing.

~ what it became ~

Once Microsoft folded it into Office, PowerPoint stopped being a product anyone chose. It became a file format and a meeting genre. Edward Tufte published an essay in 2003 arguing that the format degrades the thinking of the people using it, and the Columbia accident investigation that same year found a slide deck sitting at the center of how a fatal engineering risk had been communicated upward as a bullet point.

None of that is Forethought's fault, and all of it descends from four years of work by a company whose only memorable product shipped fourteen weeks before it was sold. Campbell and Pohlman set out to build a way for regular people to make software. What they left behind is a way for regular people to make slides, which turned out to be the larger market by an enormous margin.

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