Why didn't Keynote take off?
This is a bit of a round about story, but bear with me.
I like PowerPoint, I love using it, it's intuitive to me. Google slides is okay, (I never delved into OpenOffice or any other offshoot really), but when I have a choice, I like using PPT.
I consider myself a comfortable Apple user as well, I prefer it for most of my computing needs, but not all, so it's not like I am not capable of using the Apple ecosystem.
However, whenever I have tried Keynote or Pages or any of the "office" tools, I don't like them.
I cannot tell if this is because these products or projects were killed off because of lowspread adoption at their onset, and thus did not get any development or improvement. Apple often does not release things and then just let them die, it usually waits a long time before it releases something, so they don't release things with potential failure (maybe I'm wrong, my memory doesn't recall anything like that other than this very example lol, and I guess their camera, but I digress).
I guess my rambling is, is PowerPoint just good and Keynote just bad or is there some more interesting story to it?
I feel like there's a mixing of your personal opinions and of popularity. Those two aren't linked.
Keynotes isn't super popular, because it's Apple-specific software, and powerpoint-like software is fairly table stakes, so there's nothing notable about it. Plenty of people do use it, although certainly in the minority, as is the case with MacOS in general. That doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not you like it.
It was never going to take off, because all powerpoint software do roughly the same things, and being only on MacOS means that the population of users is by its nature limited.
If there's a story, it's how Google silently undercut everyone with GSuite, and how an entire generation of people are growing up knowing GSuite first, thanks to Chromebooks, being free, and the pros of webapps.
One other big hurdle: the programs used their own unique file extension as a default. I never really used Keynote, but I used Pages a lot until college. My first semester had a creative writing class, and there were a few times my classmates couldn't read my submissions because they had Microsoft Word. I don't think you can change the default file extension, I remember I always had to click "export" to save it as a .doc file every time.
That was what made me download the Microsoft Office Suite from my college's software repository. Having to export an assignment every time I intended to upload it was just too easy to forget. The lack of compatibility with other devices was just too inconvenient to bother. Even now, I have a bunch of files from a recovered hard drive after my last Macbook died that I have to open on my mac because they were written in Pages.
Similarly the only reason I’ve used modern Office at all is for online uni assignments where only .docx files are accepted. Pages can export these, but formatting might not transfer perfectly which bugs the perfectionist in me (though Office itself is surprisingly inconsistent between Mac, Windows, and web).
Thankfully PDFs are accepted for most assignments which Pages and Keynote are great at exporting.
I would add that familiarity and what one encountered first has a strong influence on preference. In my case, my first brushes with office software were ClarisWorks/AppleWorks on Mac OS and MS Office 98/2000 on Windows, and so I’ve disliked every version of MS Office released since the Ribbon first made its appearance and on the Mac side prefer the older Pages/Keynote/etc releases that used floating inspector palettes and more closely resembled ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.
As far as GSuite goes, the sheer popularity of Docs, Sheets, etc validates my feeling that the overwhelming majority of users don’t actually need much capability beyond what basic bundled utilities like TextEdit/WordPad provide, because of how barebones GSuite is. Aside from specific niche use cases most of the bells and whistles in MS Office sit unused. I believe that a new collaboration-first open source Office alternative that tries to replicate the minimal set of features in GSuite instead of chasing the monster that is MS Office would see a lot of success.
I'm curious to see how that pans out. Googles total lack of support for products mixed with most of gsuite falling apart at the higher professional levels strikes me as a real issue for long term.
I always preferred Keynote. A lot of features were more intuitive, less clunky, and involved fewer clicks than PowerPoint. I used Keynote for basically all of my presentations from 2009-2021.
Then I started working at a job that uses PCs fully integrated with the Microsoft system. So now I’ve been 100% PowerPoint for the past four years or so. I still find it frustrating despite many attempts to customize the toolbars and shortcuts in a more efficient way. But that’s me with Microsoft generally. I also think Keynote makes cleaner, more attractive presentations.
I suspect that’s how it is for a lot of people. Microsoft is just so integrated into the working world that it’s going to dominate, and that often leaves no choice for the user. I would not use Microsoft in any capacity were I not forced to by my employer.