Productivity software

Office suites, which brought word processing, spreadsheet, and relational database programs to the desktop in the 1980s, are the core example of productivity software.

In the United States, some 78% of "middle-skill" occupations (those that call for more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree) now require the use of productivity software.

The components are generally distributed together, have a consistent user interface and usually can interact with each other, sometimes in ways that the operating system would not normally allow.

[4] The earliest office suite for personal computers was MicroPro International's StarBurst in the early 1980s, comprising the WordStar word processor, the CalcStar spreadsheet and the DataStar database software.

Another view was that component-based software would eventually emerge, focusing development on more specialised components used by productivity software, empowering "a plethora of third-party developers", and that a "mix and match" approach of such components would adapt to the user's way of working.