Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation program,[8] created by Robert Gaskins, Tom Rudkin, and Dennis Austin[8] at a software company named Forethought, Inc.[8] It was released on April 20, 1987,[9] initially for Macintosh computers only.[8] Microsoft acquired PowerPoint for about $14 million three months after it appeared.[10] This was Microsoft's first significant acquisition,[11] and Microsoft set up a new business unit for PowerPoint in Silicon Valley where Forethought had been located.[11] PowerPoint became a component of the Microsoft Office suite, first offered in 1989 for Macintosh[12] and in 1990 for Windows,[13] which bundled several Microsoft apps. Beginning with PowerPoint 4.0 (1994), PowerPoint was integrated into Microsoft Office development, and adopted shared common components and a converged user interface.[14] PowerPoint's 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.[15]: 402–404 Since the late 1990s, PowerPoint's worldwide market share of presentation software has been estimated at 95 percent.[16] PowerPoint was originally designed to provide visuals for group presentations within business organizations, but has come to be widely used in other communication situations in business and beyond.[17] The wider use led to the development of the PowerPoint presentation as a new form of communication,[18] with strong reactions including advice that it should be used less,[19] differently,[20] or better.[21] The first PowerPoint version (Macintosh 1987) was used to produce overhead transparencies,[22] the second (Macintosh 1988, Windows 1990) could also produce color 35 mm slides.[22] The third version (Windows and Macintosh 1992) introduced video output of virtual slideshows to digital projectors, which would over time replace physical transparencies and slides.[22] A dozen major versions since then have added additional features and modes of operation[14] and have made PowerPoint available beyond Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, adding versions for iOS, Android, and web access.[23]
