Company Performance Metrics
Forethought, Inc. is a computer software company that developed PowerPoint, a slide-based presentation program. The company was founded by Rob Campbell and Taylor Pohlman in 1983. Their aim was to develop an object-oriented, bit-mapped application software. The development team was led by Bob Gaskins and Dennis Austin, who called the presentation
program Presenter, which was later renamed as PowerPoint.
The first shipment of the PowerPoint application (PowerPoint 1.0) was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh. It had a monochrome output and generated text and graphic transparencies for overhead slides. In July of the same year, Microsoft Corporation acquired Forethought.
In 1990, the first version of Microsoft Windows was released, with PowerPoint as a standard part of the Microsoft Office suite of applications.
To date, Microsoft PowerPoint is widely used by business people, educators, students, and trainers, and dominates the presentation software market.
