"Sweating Bullets" is the true story of how to get a "killer application" to the market first, with breakthrough capabilities, then prosper in the world's foremost OS and application corporation, and stay at the top for decades. No small task.
Robert Gaskins eloquently describes his path from his early vision, to building a team, through being acquired by Microsoft to make PowerPoint the dominant presentation platform worldwide.
At a time when some of the world was still bound to command line interfaces and graphics capabilities in computers were limited, Bob Gaskins saw the demand and set about creating the presentation tool that is the world standard even twenty years later.
"Sweating Bullets" also describes the alliance with Genigraphics which was key to early successes of both firms and which accomplished the only direct embedding of an external service in a Microsoft application. The entrepreneurs of Genigraphics, like Bob's PowerPoint team, were inventors and pioneers in so much of what is still the preeminent world-wide presentation platform.
More than a dairy, Bob recounts the thought processes that guided the development and marketing of the product, and that way of thinking is as potent today as it was then.
Spanning technology, negotiation, marketing, cultures and technological convergence, this book is essential reading for any technology entrepreneur, developer or marketer who must navigate creating and growing new technologies for new and changing markets.