Microsoft originally marketed a spreadsheet program called Multiplan in 1982. Multiplan became very popular on CP/M systems, but on MS-DOS systems it lost popularity to Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on 30 September 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) in November 1987.

It has always amused me that Excel started on Mac. It illustrates the basic Microsoft strategy - take something that works for someone else and fuck it up horribly. Anyone who knows the history of OOXML knows that M$ ain't doing anything that isn't deeply anticompetitive, deeply tone-deaf to the needs of the community, and deeply blind to the forces that are forcing them to change.

| MS could create the next mobile enterprise OS,|

Spoken like someone who has never owned a Windows phone. They were tolerable back when you could still spend the weekend hacking the registry to make them work, blowing $45 on shit from handango and restarting them fresh every morning. That ceased to be possible with the 6600. Put it this way - I was FTPing excel spreadsheets with embedded pictures shot on my phone from job sites via CDMA in 2002... and the fucking iPhone was a goddamn miracle, lack of copy-paste be damned.

I'm excruciatingly sick of OS X. I am now running third party alternatives for everything - iCal, address book, Finder, Mail, everything - but the Windows machine I use to tweak my bike is XPSP3 and will stay that way forever.