Perhaps the winning feature of Excel was its recalculating capability which Doug developed. You can imagine that in an era where computing power was fractions of what it is today , this was a huge performance feat that pushed Microsoft ahead.
The release date for Excel 1. And despite Excel seeming like the perfect name in hindsight, the code name for the project was actually Odyssey and potential product names at the time included Master Plan and Mr.
Keep in mind that this was a product made in the times when Microsoft still had yet to IPO and most product was still touched by Bill Gates. And I think largely why Excel emerged as the spreadsheet leader was the ethos behind Bill and the Excel team. In fact, Klunder gives credit to Gates himself for the idea behind how to implement the product-defining intelligent recalc feature, despite Gates telling him he implemented something completely different.
The story pares down to a team that focused on long-term objectives and built up a system that could and would be be a market leader for decades to come.
It took something that only a few people could process data and allowed the world to touch it, see it, and manipulate it. There was no longer just a black box. The concept of enabling access is something we as users often take for granted, but a principle that technologists have been leveraging for decades. This access bridge simply needs to identify a constraint for many individuals and to remove it, ideally with technology, just as Klunder enabled high computation on slow machines with intelligent calc.
Without these tools, only a small subset of individuals with tailored experience could participate. Now, the whole world can. And what can be built to enable these individuals? PS: Come join the conversation on Twitter. Therapist: And what do we do when we're feeling restless? Stay up to date! Microsoft Excel? But I do want to reflect on it. Even after decades of innovation, I want to talk about Excel. From light-weight databases, to todo-lists and scheduling, data gathering, data analysis, and sophisticated business processing.
These are all examples of common uses for spreadsheet software, and this is obviously by no means a comprehensive list of the things spreadsheets are used for. I love Excel! How many businesses would not be able to function? They actually build solutions on top of Excel. Things that have been running for years. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2. When Microsoft launched the Windows operating system in , Excel was one of the first application products released for it.
When Windows finally gained wide acceptance with Version 3. For nearly 3 years, Excel remained the only Windows spreadsheet program and it has only received competition from other spreadsheet products since the summer of By the late s many companies had introduced spreadsheet products.
Spreadsheet products and the spreadsheet software industry were maturing. Microsoft and Bill Gates had joined the fray with the innovative Excel spreadsheet.
Lotus had acquired Software Arts and the rights to VisiCalc. The spreadsheet entrepreneurs were moving on In January of , Lotus Development filed suit against Paperback Software and separately against Mosaic Software claiming they had infinged on the Lotus spreadsheet software.
In a related matter, Software Arts, the developerof the original VisiCalc spreadsheet software filed a separate action against Lotus claiming that Lotus was an infringement of VisiCalc.
Briefly, Lotus won the legal battles, but lost the "market share war" to Microsoft. According to Russo and Nafziger "The Court granted Lotus' motion dismissing the Software Arts' action and confirming that Lotus had acquired all rights, including all claims, as part of the earlier transaction. Twin was designed to work like Lotus' and advertising proclaimed it "offers you so much more, for so muchless.
Their visual displays were not however identical to or to each other. The Court ruled that "[t]his particular expression of a menu structure is not essential to theelectronic spreadsheet idea, nor does it merge with the somewhat less abstract idea of a menu structure for an electronic spreadsheet Paperback Software Int'l, F.
Dan has VisiCalc at his site. Bob Frankston is "pursuing a number of projects According to a Red Herring Profile , Mitch Kapor "gradually traded in his position as an entrepreneur searching for the next big technology idea for the long-term advisory role of angel investor". Mitch's web site is Kapor Enterprises, Inc. Frontline Systems Inc. A solver add-in can be used for both equation-solving often called goalseeking and for constrained optimization using linear programming, nonlinear programming, and integer programming methods.
Bajarin, T. Browne, Christopher. Claymon, D. Henderson, T. Cobb, G. Spreadheet Software from VisiCalc to Indianapolis: Que Corp.
In recent times, simple spreadsheet errors have contributed to everything from misguided justifications for global economic austerity to billion-dollar bank trading scandals. Academics at Dartmouth got access to live spreadsheets from a group of companies and found only a third were error-free. People who worry about these things push for people to ditch Excel in favor of more centralized, security-conscious tools for building databases and running analyses.
This is futile, not least because there is a thriving cottage industry in software and consulting for companies to better manage their spreadsheets, acknowledging that they are now a permanently ingrained feature of the corporate world, for better or worse. And like other office technologies , our love-hate relationship with spreadsheets makes them a popular source of ridicule , allowing co-workers to bond over the perversity of pivot tables and sorrow of circular references.
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