Spreadsheet Wars: How Excel Beat VisiCalc & Lotus 1-2-3!
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- Опубликовано: 13 июл 2023
- Visicalc was one of the first spreadsheet software programs ever released, released in 1979, it was an immediate success and quickly became the go-to tool for businesses and individuals looking to organize and analyze data. 3 years after the launch of Visicalc in 1982 a new spreadsheet entered the market, it was called Lotus 1-2-3, it was one of the most groundbreaking programs of the 80s, it was one of the first WYSIWYG spreadsheets which stands for what you see is what you get, from its release it immediately began to outsell the Visicalc spreadsheet and become the dominant spreadsheet of the 80s. But its dominance wouldn’t last for long as it became victim to the changing tides of the computer industry which led to the rise of Microsoft Excel, Excel became the most dominant spreadsheet from the 90s onwards. This story includes a bitter legal battle, a former employer who becomes his past employer's downfall, and a seismic market shift caused by the popularity of the GUI. This is the story of the spreadsheet wars.
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Back in the early days of PCs, Multiplan was a strong force in the market. Its big advantage over Lotus was its ability to link spreadsheets. I taught many secretaries (now admin assistants) how to use Multiplan and it changed their role in business. It also helped that Multiplan would run on a PC, Mac, Decwriter with a CPM daughter card and the Tandy 16 running Xenix. The second big reason that Multiplan was successful was its documentation. It took a user from the very beginning through all the basic commands and finished with linked spread sheets. Linked spreadsheets allowed non financial types to build complex analysis. Lotus was limited to a single spread sheet that lived in the memory of the PC. Large Lotus spreadsheets were hard to navigate on character based screens.
Microsoft won the spreadsheet wars for several reasons, and not all were good, and your video glossed over a lot of underhanded practices used by Microsoft. First, they offered deep discounts to bundle their office products (even dating back to their MS-DOS days). They also typically found and bought competing products and incorporated them into their existing products (embrace, extend, extinguish). The most nefarious was that Microsoft worked into Windows 3.0 and newer code that would detect if a competitor's product was being run and either make it not work or make it not able to access the computer's entire resources, thus crippling their opponents software (like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, dBase, Paradox, etc.) and making it appear that their products were superior. They were taken to court over this but by the time it went through the courts the damage had been done and Microsoft had moved on.
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thanks a lot
will never watch this timid boot licker vid again
And?
Wow, you folks are very sensitive. Get some help, this is not normal.
Deep discounts for bundling sounds like a smart business strategy, not an underhanded practice. Also, Microsoft was able to get Excel out while Lotus failed to get Jazz out. First to market can be a major factor in success.
Just a remark from someone who was there - in the corporate world, what really helped the switch from 1-2-3 to Excel was that Excel was nearly 100% compatible with 1-2-3. It was able to read 1-2-3 files, use 1-2-3 macros, and use 1-2-3 keyboard commands. This was so critical in 1987 that AFAIK this compatibility is still included in Excel (although I haven't personally tested it in a long time).
I was a wizard with 123 and wrote Lotus macros to automate alot of work. I've also used VP Planner and Quattro Pro. Back in the day 123 WordPerfect and dBASE were the standard in each category that they were standalone companies. But I think what did them all in was Microsoft bundled all 3 into one office package. Each of the competition were only standalone. So Novell tried to create their own office package then sold it to Corel who now owns WordPerfect and Quattro Pro but it's too late. IBM bought 123 but did so for Lotus Notes the email and calendar client. I worked at IBM and they never spent money to improve 123 so it languished as a forgetten product. They still sold it but nobody wanted it so they discontinued it. IBM later sold Lotus Notes as the market no longer used email clients when the world went mobile. But 123 was a legend back in the day.
Microsoft even replicated the Lotus bug that allowed for the 2/29/1900 date. That date does not exist (1900 was not a leap year), but it does exist in Lotus, and Excel (for compatibility with date values).
Not only that, Lotus developed Improv, meant to be be next evolution of the spreadsheet, but continued to market 123, confusing customers. They even developed a version for the next computer system, headed up by Steve Jobs.
Nothing about Microsoft's alleged antitrust activities? From Wikipedia: "As a result, Microsoft "punished the IBM PC Company [which had just bought Lotus] with higher prices, a late license for Windows 95, and the withholding of technical and marketing support."" Lotus was not able to ship its software on Windows 95 when it came out partly due to Microsoft allegedly withholding the Windows 95 APIs and software toolkits. Therefore, Excel was shipping on Windows 95 at its launch; Lotus 123 was not shipping on Windows 95 until much later.
Gates and Ballmer were two peas in the same pod. They even colluded to cheat Gates childhood friend Paul Allen out of his rightful price when he sold his MS shares when he got diagnosed with cancer. Those two were found by scraping all the scum from the bottom of the _Humanity Barrel_ and they were the dregs that was
left behind.
VisiCorp released the Visi On graphical interface for the IBM PC in October 1983: that was between the Apple Lisa (January 1983) and the Apple Macintosh (January 1984), and two years before the first MS Windows version.
Bill Gates at first did not believe that Visi On was running on a PC during a COMDEX 1982 demonstration, he suspected there was a VAX or other mini computer doing the heavy lifting somewhere hidden behind a curtain.
The deep user interface of 123 and Sam Ami, which became Lotus Word Pro, were superb. When IBM killed them and I first encountered Excel and Word, it was like being dragged back into the dark ages. Word and Excel are still poor in this regard.
During my student days I used Lotus Ami Pro for writing seminar papers and my diploma thesis and, of course, my private correspondence. I compared Ami Pro to MS Word and WordStar in a computer store and Ami Pro convinced me from the start. I loved to use Ami Pro.
I started my professional career at Lotus Development in Munich in the customer support department. I helped customers with using Lotus Smartsuite and with solving problems. I still love the concept of formatting and controlling the whole document/sheet/presentation within the famous infobox. When I switched jobs and had to use MS Office I also was deeply disappointed by the poor user experience and often got annoyed by the additional time I had to spend on MS Office for achieving the same things I managed quiet easily with Smartsuite.
It's a big pity that IBM never released the source code of the Smartsuite applications for open source development.
Back in the late 80’s I used Lotus 123 to create accrual charts using macros. It was the very definition of spaghetti coding. But it was so satisfying to be able to visualize predictions and how close they were to actual expenses.
Mitch Kapor went on to do some other remarkable things after leaving Lotus. He invested in ISPs in the early days of the Internet, and was also a cofounder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Used VisiCalc w/ Apple 2c in early 80's - it was amazing.
Thank you, this was so informative. A tours through the most versatile piece of sofware in use today!
MS won the "Office Suite" battle since it was the only company to integrate ALL their Office Products with their most popular "Programming Language" (Visual Basic v3.0) via OLE (Object linking & embedding) and DDE (dynamic data exchange).
No other company was able to do this in a timely manner. (including Borland, who had a popular C++ IDE called OWL )
In addition VB integrated seamlessly with ACCESS-DB and SQL-Server.
You could integrate DB query results directly into your EXCEL sheets (or Word & PP docs) without any tedious data conversions or format rules.
This total-integration philosophy was a real game changer in the 90's.
are you sure it wasn't the dancing paper clip? because the dancing paper clip was pretty dope.
You are describing my coding days
The original Microsoft spreadsheet was MultiPlan.
that's true
Microsoft coded with some super-fast internal functions that weren't available to 3rd party developers. Once it was known there were some suits against Microsoft.
And Quattro Pro which was better at the time.
I remember using Multiplan. I wrote a system to run a supermarket chains price book for 6 price zones.
can you explain more about that supermarket price book?
Thanks for the video. One slight correction: Mitch Kapor’s last name is pronounced KAY-por, not ka-POOR. His ethnic background is Jewish rather than Indian.
Its crazy to think Kapor worked for VisCalc before he left and started a company that killed VisiCalc
its really wild!
You’d be surprised but this happens a lot. Developers from Cisco’s WebEx left to create the competing product, Zoom
🤷 You should try to keep your best performers, but you can not always win that battle. All the best camera/image processing engineers from Nokia are now working for Apple, Google and Intel.
Quatro Pro beat Lotus 123 in the DOS world. Quatro Pro was so good that it was sued by Lotus 123 because it was too similar to 123. Windows 95, 98 and 2000 were too unstable. It took Windows NT and Windows XP to solve the problem. And then there was Office 97 with Excel with VBA and Windows NT that made an unstopable combination.
Finally you post :)
yeah its been a while!
I started with Lotus 1-2-3 back when it was THE program to have and still have installation floppy disks. I am not a fan on Exel, but I have been using Corel's Quattro Pro for at least 20 years and love it. I have never used VisiCalc.
Excel was not originally Microsoft program. They bought it. Lotus like the Ashton Tate relational data base program were insanely difficult to install and each company had a self defeating sense of security, not of your information but of their software. And Excell did it's calculation (icantonations) work without the Lotus idea of recalculating every cell instead of only changed and related cells. Ashton Tate failed just because their marketing program that essentially told all potential users that the company didn't trust or like them
Sorry, music too distracting, voice too quiet.
I'll work on toning down the music a little
I used quatro pro, 123r4w and then excel since office 4.3 till office 019
The spreadsheet. Mainframe on the PC.
good video and good story, but alot of video footages was inaccurate or unrelated .. thank you ✅✅..
LMAO. Lotus 1-2-3... This was the spreadsheet king back in my Wall Street days. When they added charting capabilities it was a ground breaker.
Nice. Microsoft Multiplan was their first attempt. That was the first one I used.
I used VP Planner Quattro and 123. They were installed in alot of schools.
Me too. They wanted to sell me visicalc with my first Apple //e, but MS Multiplan had just received the “best software of the year” award, so I got it instead. Multiplan allowed you to “link” spreadsheets to overcome the memory limitation of the computer. I think Multiplan was the prototype for Excel with “workbooks” with multiple “worksheets” which could be linked.
I sold Apple II computers with Visicalc to everybody from Naval Postgrad students to a plumbing contractor who wrote an entire bidding system for himself. The spreadsheet sold itself, the computer was just the non-optional accessory. But Lotus always felt like a scam to me. Excel finally did it as close to right as possible at the time. (But I'll NEVER forgive them for _Access,,,_ 😑)
I did not know that Visicalc was available on audio cassette tape for an Apple II with just 32k RAM, had always thought that Visicalc needed 48k with Woz's fast 5.25" Disk ][ drive. Me being just old enough to use the AppleWorks 2.1 spreadsheet on a 128k //e in the late 80's
A plumber wrote an entire bidding system for himself. Dafuq was he a plumber for
What about SuperCalc ? ..
Damn! SO many spreadsheets I forgot about. I guess once you had the _concept,_ the _coding_ isn't that difficult. Link in Apple/Microsoft/Dartmouth Basic's built-in math library to do most of the heavy lifting inside the cell and massage till it's nice and GUI... I used code programs in FoxPro that wrote Foxpro programs or built relational tables for my end users. Similar processes, but a lot easier to write.
Lotus to slow releasing windows version of 123.
I used VisiCalc on a TRS80, then SuperCalc on a PC. Never used L123, but I did use a shareware one called "As Easy As" ... 123, which was a virtual clone of 123. Multiplan on a TRS80 model 4 was rediculiously slow, even compared with VC on the model 1. Also used some oddball spreadsheets, one on a Amstrad CPC that was seemingly written in BASIC! Even the Psion Organiser (handheld computer) had a "pocket spreadshedet", but trying to work with that on a 4-line x 20 character display was awful!
The Psion Organizer was so cool!
Can’t believe you forgot to mention Microsoft Multiplan. Multiplan was exceptional and prepared Windows.
I sort of made that point by acknowledging that Microsoft had been working on spreadsheets before excel, although I didn't go into detail by specifically talking about Multiplan
I was hoping for a mention of Quattro Pro.
First thing that came to mind...
Quattro was great, I used it a lot in the late 1980s, along with Paradox database, and Multimate Word Processor.
I might make a dedicated video about it
How does LibreOffice Calc compare to Excel?
I have no idea, excel is too entrenched in the modern work place soo much so that I doubt the majority of people are aware of LibreOffice Calc
Poderia ter legendas automáticas. Faz falta.
Another great video
Glad you enjoyed it
No mention of Jazz?
DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run. The MS DOS upgrade principle. 😂
😂
4:10 Vest pocket big enough to hold a 5¼” floppy disk.
You left out SuperCalc and Multiplan.
There were a lot of copycats. Also VP Planner, Quattro Pro were very good. Multiplan turned into Excel. But without a doubt 123 was king. Too bad after IBM bought them they let it languish. I worked at IBM and they never put much money into developing it.
This might have been an interesting video but the droning monotone voice made me turn off after a few minutes. You sound half asleep.
I am working on getting a better microphone that captures more of my voice
“Excel is a major pain for business professionals today” … dude you never learned arithmetic!
And where is Multiplan?
I did not focus on it but I briefly mentioned that Microsoft had been working on spreadsheets for a while before excel
7:02 BASIC without line numbers ... how novel.
7:36 Amiga ... I see. But that was later, from 1985 onwards.
But the original programs were programmed in assembly as wikipedia reads? Basic was the python of the 80s performance wise so it wouldn't make much sense for a number-crunching application I think?
You’re seriously comparing DOS based spreadsheets to GUI based software to explain why Excel won the spreadsheet wars?
the point I was making was that most spreadsheet companies were caught off guard with rapid adoption of the GUI, so they weren't prepared
Does anybody remember TMaker?
I'll look into its story
I liked VisiCalc because it had macros.
And beat quatro pro....!!
there were more spreadsheet programs than PONG clones!!!
Meh. Apple's Numbers is all I need. I don't need any of the advantages of xcel, and ms didn't even originally make Excel either (same as ppt).
And Borland Quattro Pro
Everything Borland made was great!
Unfortunately, at the height of their success, the courts started allowed law suits against computer companies and that shut them down.
I might make a video specifically about Borland
It's was never as good as either Planperfect or Lucid 3D.
Microchip and their purchased spreadsheet app beat Lotus 1-2-3 because they put code into Windows that nobbled Lotus and made it run slower than the app they renamed to Excel. Wasn't the only shifty and shonky 💩 they pulled to make "their" apps run better than the better opposition applications.
And now my OS is trying to SELL me shit - while I'm working... That's a Window we need to shut.
Excel won because of integration, financial backing, marketing and Microsoft pressured PC makers to promote their products.
And is a major pain for many unfortunate professionals today! 😂
That’s a great way to end!
Thanks!
Agreed! 😂
I remember buying and using Excel 1.0 in 1985 for my Macintosh 512k (RAM). Excel was obviously superior to Lotus123. Excel is "a major pain for many unfortunate professionals today"? That statement you threw in at the end is laughable.
lol, he must have been long Visicorp stock
Yeah, "Tech History Channel" needs to figure out whether it's a history channel or a vehicle for snide remarks.
The "music" is obtrusive
I'll experiment with using less of it
Performance advantages for Excel were derived by cheating. Microsoft provided the languages upon which most of their partnering software developers like Lotus and Wordperfect wrote their upgrades. Microsoft did not communicate or document faster procedures which they utilized themselves in Excel. The other companies ought to have gotten together and sue Microsoft but they never did; letting Microsoft get away with this - had they done so Microsoft would have never established itself in the business software segment of the market, and would appear a cheat.
I remember when that was the case in the late 90's, that it was well known how Microsoft hold for their advantage, the inner coding how Office was done.
It was all the way from the installer to the usage, where inner functions gave huge speed boost and third party was multiple times slower.
🤣Your comment is totally absurd. And you sound like a slashdog refugee from 1999 or something. 🤣
@@katumusTruth. I used to benchmark this.
123 was the shit. So was Symphony but ran too slowly.
Your final comment made me give you a thumb’s down.
sorry to hear that :(