Xhosa, isi. Zulu, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Khmer, Kinyarwanda, Ki. Swahili, Konkani, Korean, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian FYROMacedonia, Malay Latin, Malayalam, Maltese, Maori, Marathi, Mongolian Cyrillic, Nepali, Norwegian Bokml, Norwegian Nynorsk, Odia, Pashto, Persian Farsi, Polish, Portuguese Portugal, Portuguese Brazil, Punjabi Gurmukhi, Quechua, Romanian, Romansh, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Serbian Cyrillic, Serbia, Serbian Latin, Serbia, Serbian Cyrillic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sesotho sa Leboa, Setswana, Sindhi Arabic, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tamil, Tatar Cyrillic, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen Latin, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uyghur, Uzbek Latin, Valencian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Wolof, Yoruba. Type. Presentation program. License. Trialware. Websiteoffice. microsoft. Power. Point. Microsoft Power. Point is a presentation program,4 created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin4 at a software company named Forethought, Inc. It was released on April 2. Macintosh computers only. Microsoft acquired Power. Point for 1. 4 million three months after it appeared. This was Microsofts first significant acquisition,7 and Microsoft set up a new business unit for Power. Point in Silicon Valley where Forethought had been located. Power. Point became a component of the Microsoft Office suite, first offered in 1. Macintosh8 and in 1. Windows,9 which bundled several Microsoft apps. Beginning with Power. Point 4. 0 1. 99. Power. Point was integrated into Microsoft Office development, and adopted shared common components and a converged user interface. Power. Points market share was very small at first, prior to introducing a version for Microsoft Windows, but grew rapidly with the growth of Windows and of Office. Since the late 1. Power. Points worldwide market share of presentation software has been estimated at 9. Power. Point was originally designed to provide visuals for group presentations within business organizations, but has come to be very widely used in many other communication situations, both in business and beyond. The impact of this much wider use of Power. Point has been experienced as a powerful change throughout society,1. The first Power. Point version Macintosh 1. Macintosh 1. 98. 8, Windows 1. The third version Windows and Macintosh 1. A dozen major versions since then have added many additional features and modes of operation1. Power. Point available beyond Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, adding versions for i. OS, Android, and web access. HistoryeditCreation at Forethought 1. Power. Point was created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software startup in Silicon Valley named Forethought, Inc. Forethought had been founded in 1. Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh. On July 5, 1. 98. Forethought hired Robert Gaskins as its vice president of product development, to create a new application that would be especially suited to the new graphical personal computers. Gaskins produced his initial description of Power. Point about a month later August 1. Presentation Graphics for Overhead Projection. By October of 1. 98. Gaskins had selected Dennis Austin to be the developer for Power. Point. 2. 4 Gaskins and Austin worked together on the definition and design of the new product for nearly a year, and produced the first specification document dated August 2. This first design document showed a product as it would look in Microsoft Windows 1. Development from that spec was begun by Austin in November 1. Macintosh first. 2. About six months later, on May 1, 1. Gaskins and Austin chose a second developer to join the project, Thomas Rudkin. Gaskins prepared two final product specification marketing documents in June of 1. Macintosh and Windows. At about the same time, Austin, Rudkin, and Gaskins produced a second and final major design specification document, this time showing a Macintosh look. Throughout this development period the product was called Presenter. Then, just before release, there was a last minute check with Forethoughts lawyers to register the name as a trademark, and Presenter was unexpectedly rejected because it had already been used by someone else. Gaskins says that he thought of Power. Point, based on the products goal of empowering individual presenters, and sent that name to the lawyers for clearance, while all the documentation was hastily revised. Funding to complete development of Power. Point was assured in mid January, 1. Apple Computer venture capital fund, called Apples Strategic Investment Group,3. Power. Point to be its first investment. A month later, on February 2. Forethought announced Power. Point at the Personal Computer Forum in Phoenix John Sculley, the CEO of Apple, appeared at the announcement and said We see desktop presentation as potentially a bigger market for Apple than desktop publishing. Power. Point 1. 0 for Macintosh shipped from manufacturing on April 2. Acquisition by Microsoft 1. By early 1. 98. 7, Microsoft was starting to plan a new application to create presentations, an activity led by Jeff Raikes, who was head of marketing for the Applications Division. Microsoft assigned an internal group to write a specification and plan for a new presentation product. They contemplated an acquisition to speed up development, and in early 1. Microsoft sent a letter of intent to acquire Dave Winers product called MORE, an outlining program that could print its outlines as bullet charts. During this preparatory activity Raikes discovered that a program specifically to make overhead presentations was already being developed by Forethought, Inc., and that it was nearly completed. Raikes and others visited Forethought on February 6, 1. Raikes later recounted his reaction to seeing Power. Point and his report about it to Bill Gates, who was initially skeptical 3. I thought, software to do overheadsthats a great idea. I came back to see Bill. I said, Bill, I think we really ought to do this and Bill said, No, no, no, no, no, thats just a feature of Microsoft Word, just put it into Word. And I kept saying, Bill, no, its not just a feature of Microsoft Word, its a whole genre of how people do these presentations. And, to his credit, he listened to me and ultimately allowed me to go forward and. Silicon Valley called Forethought, for the product known as Power. Point. When Power. Point was released by Forethought, its initial press was favorable the Wall Street Journal reported on early reactions I see about one product a year I get this excited about, says Amy Wohl, a consultant in Bala Cynwyd, Pa. People will buy a Macintosh just to get access to this product. On April 2. 8, 1. Microsofts senior executives spent another day at Forethought to hear about initial Power. Point sales on Macintosh and plans for Windows. The following day, Microsoft sent a letter to Dave Winer withdrawing its earlier letter of intent to acquire his company,3. May of 1. 98. 7 Microsoft sent a letter of intent to acquire Forethought. As requested in that letter of intent, Robert Gaskins from Forethought went to Redmond for a one on one meeting with Bill Gates in early June, 1. July an agreement was concluded for an acquisition.