PowerPoint

Sales and market share

PowerPoint's initial sales were about 40,000 copies sold in 1987 (nine months), about 85,000 copies in 1988, and about 100,000 copies in 1989, all for Macintosh. Computer Intelligence estimated that year that Microsoft had 6% of the Fortune 1000 PC presentation software market, third to Ashton-Tate's 40% and Lotus Development's 20%. PowerPoint's market share in its first three years was a tiny part of the total presentation market, which was very heavily dominated by MS-DOS applications on PCs. The market leaders on MS-DOS in 1988–1989 were Harvard Graphics (introduced by Software Publishing in 1986) in first place, and Lotus Freelance Plus (also introduced in 1986) as a strong second. They were competing with more than a dozen other MS-DOS presentation products, and Microsoft did not develop a PowerPoint version for MS-DOS. After three years, PowerPoint sales were disappointing. Jeff Raikes, who had bought PowerPoint for Microsoft, later recalled: "By 1990, it looked like it wasn't a very smart idea [for Microsoft to have acquired PowerPoint], because not very many people were using PowerPoint."