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Lessons from the Rise and Quick Decline of First ‘Killer App’
- Gys 7y ago> Remember VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet? Today’s tech giants do, and that is why they buy up and invest in potential competitive threats
- akulkarni 7y ago“VisiCalc, meanwhile, was mired in a lawsuit between its creators and its publishers—software in its early days was distributed under an author-publisher model, like books.“ It really is incredible how much the software industry has changed over the years.
- ghaff 7y agoI sometimes wonder whether something that looks like a spreadsheet was pretty much an inevitable invention and major category of office software. A word processor certainly seems inevitable. And, probably, something that lets you create content to be projected. But the spreadsheet? Certainly tabular data was very common in a business setting but I sometimes wonder if that had to lead to Visicalc, Lotus 1-2-3, and Excel.
- gumby 7y agoThe literal spreadsheet -- a printed sheet of paper with rows and columns, with the rows and columns summed at their ends -- was common in business and taught in business school. Bricklin got his idea in a classroom for a reason. For my first company, in 1989, our "checkbook" was a literal spreadsheet: when you (hand) wrote a check, a carbon strip transferred the payeee, amount etc onto a spreadsheet underneath it. But like so many things the spreadsheet itself evolved over centuries. Likewise I used early word processors as a kid in the 1970s and there was enough variation in how they worked and thought of the buffer that it was clearly not "obvious". Even emacs and vi, which evolved from command-based editors (TECO and ed respectively) took opposite approaches (modeless vs modal) to their fundamental interaction model. And Bravo on the Alto (what you call Word today), while choosing modeless, took of course a different point on the interaction plane. Nothing obvious about it.
- ghaff 7y agoIn the spreadsheet space, there were a few attempts to rethink spreadsheets--especially for financial modeling. Javelin was one. Lotus Improv was another. None of them ever went mainstream although I assume some concepts may live on in specialty software.
- jdsully 7y agoYour phrasing implies Word has a shared code base like BSD and Unix do. The connection of Bravo with Word is that Charles Simonyi was involved with both. You see that with a lot of Xerox PARC projects - the researches frustrated with Xerox's failure to commercialize their research went elsewhere to implement their vision.
- germinalphrase 7y agoAs a high school level teacher, I think it’s inevitable that there will be a system for shared, trustable assessment that merges the advantages of standardized testing with the flexibility of classroom instruction - but it certainly doesn’t exist now.
- inlined 7y agoI used to follow acquisition prices more closely. I was fascinated that an acquisition that complimented a company’s efforts closed for orders of magnitude than an acquisition of a competitor.
- kaycebasques 7y ago> an acquisition that complimented a company’s efforts closed for orders of magnitude than an acquisition of a competitor You’re missing a key word here. Orders of magnitude more or less?
- inlined 7y agoLess >_<