The history of ClarisWorks

mossy_11

Just found this article on the history of ClarisWorks -- the chief Mac competitor to Microsoft Works (a cut-down version of Microsoft Office) in the 90s. It's written by one of the original developers, and is quite an interesting tale.

It makes me wonder just how often destructive rifts form between management and development teams at software companies.

Pixelcade

What an interesting article. I'm sure these rifts exist all over the place. In my field it's between marketing and the design team. I remember using that program all the time thinking it was outstanding for it's primary function. Many a paper was written in that software.

jetboy

Claris CAD was another quality program (we used that for a lot of design classes in high school back in the day.)

RIP Claris :(

Of course ClarisWorks became AppleWorks... did part of that then turn into Pages? Probably not... but AppleWorks was okay.

Edit: Interesting... never knew... ClarisWorks BEGAN its life as AppleWorks. Claris was then a spin-off company of Apple's that made AppleWorks for MacOS and Windows. Afterwards Apple took back AppleWorks (and that's the AppleWorks I know.)

Interesting bit of history...

Wizo

I have never used ClarisWorks, but I used the "reincarnated" AppleWorks. Honestly, I think it's much better than iWork. I dunno, but I think that office suites haven't evolved much in the last 15 years, other than changing file formats so that we have to buy new versions.