Quote Originally Posted by kexodusc
Not to mention they totally ripped off VisiCalc, Lotus, and Quattro Pro along the way.
You're right about that. Microsoft was floundering in the spreadsheet market with Multiplan until Apple basically handed them the keys to the vault by having them develop the spreadsheet application for the Mac. Lotus never understood how to design around a graphical interface. They were too wedded to their key command structure (which worked quite well, but it was still a DOS command based program) and could never integrate that into the Mac (and later Windows) menu options. Because Multiplan offered nothing that anyone would want to port over to the Mac, Microsoft could start anew with a blank slate. (though they did start with a version of Multiplan for the Mac, which Excel quickly succeeded)

The irony is that in those days, Lotus had the reputation for developing slow bloated programs for the Mac, while Microsoft was developing the programs that actually worked right and took full advantage of the graphical interface. Of course, that would all change later on when Microsoft grew to dominate the Mac application market, and their releases increasingly came with major bugs and slow performance -- practices that they would carry over to the PC side as well with Windows.