I watched Excel meet 1-2-3, and beat it fair and square
I remember Lotus 1-2-3 very well. It really was as widely used as all the history-of-Lotus stories claim it was. In fact, back around, say, 1984, when almost no software package had a monopoly, Lotus already had its particular niche locked up tightly. That’s right: WordPerfect was still a serious competitor to Microsoft Word …
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@BoldMan
The German Excel version can't even handle numerical values in csv files properly. It wants to use . as a thousands separator and , as a decimal separator. When was the last time you've seen thousands separators in csv files?
Re: Excel > 1-2-3? Only at the beginning...
I used to do "1-2-3 programming", writing macros for clients - we used to write "real" software as well, but people often wanted automated worksheets.
One set of macros was so complex (it used to download sales forecasting information for a major chemical company from a VAX and produce manufacturing plans), that it started doing "random" things. If you stepped through in debug, it worked, run the macro and it would do different things every time!
In the end, we contacted Lotus. Their reaction? Wow, we never expected anybody to do anything so complex with 1-2-3. :-D
paradigm shift
There was nothing unusual about the way Lotus disappeared. Yes it was an excellent product and no, it did not have much competition, so it is not a surprise that it thrived. However, as soon as something better came along, it had the choice, adapt, or die. From the same era, consider DBase III. Clever name aside, it was the dominant product in the market until something better came along in the form of FoxBase. Neither product survived the transition to modern GUIs.
Re: paradigm shift
Er, Foxbase got bought by MS. Hung around for a while with a GUI tacked on. One unfortunate feature was that hitting the "Close Window" icon while in the Fox Read Cycle left the thing hung like a dog and it was reboot time(!)
The engine ended up as the JET engine in Access, which is why MS bought the thing in the first place.
Re: paradigm shift
"The engine ended up as the JET engine in Access, which is why MS bought the thing in the first place."
It was Fox's Rushmore query optimization that got added to Jet, which already existed when the two companies merged in 1992. There was probably a lot of code merging after that while ODBC was being created.
FoxPro!
Actually, I used FoxPro for anything "Windows GUI programming" for most of the 90's. It was pretty goodd for Windows 3.1, their problem was that it never really got updated after that.
Re: FoxPro!
> their problem was that it never really got updated after that.
As incorrect as it's possible to be - VFP 9 SP2 dates from 2009 and remains supported until the end of 2014. Contrast with VB6.
Re: paradigm shift
"The engine ended up as the JET engine in Access, which is why MS bought the thing in the first place."
The good old MS KC policy. Kill and cannibalize.
Re: paradigm shift
Wasn't Jet used as the database for Active Directory?
Re: paradigm shift
>Wasn't Jet used as the database for Active Directory?
No.
The Exchange mail database eingine is also called Jet, but it's not the same.
The Exchange directory (which was extended to become Active Directory) is also used by Exchange, but it's not the same as either Jet or the Exchange mail database engine.
Jet is a multi-user database engine. Exchange is a single-user database engine. AD is a replicating database enigne.
Re: paradigm shift
...it was the dominant product in the market until something better came along in the form of FoxBase. Neither product survived the transition to modern GUIs.
Not through lack of trying. Just in last few years, I had come across an application that used a Fox backend to handle the database side of things.
We were trying to get it off one old machine, onto a newer box, newer OS, and in the process of trying to get the thing to work, I don't think I swore that much ever before.
Re: paradigm shift
Believe you are wrong. Each AD instance actually runs jet as the underlying store and then builds replication on top of that. There are a few variants of Jet lying around, but they derive from a common source. AFAIK
Re: FoxPro!
As I said, the drawback was that if you thumped the "close" box (red "X") on a Fox app window, it left the old skool DOS engine sat in the background, twiddling its thumbs and waiting for input that would never come. Insult heaped upon injury was that you couldn't disable the close box as the OS put that in.
I remember doing a training course in which this was pointed out and demonstrated. I noticed that one of the MS demo apps actually shut down gracefully when this was done. The trainer opened the thing to look at the code and swore long and hard. There was a code block helpfully commented to say that it was handling the graceful close........which was both nigh-on rocket science and on a par for size with the rest of the application.
Re access. It's not a great database for proper multi-user database applications, but it's a bloody wonderful RAD solution for the horrors you find lurking in Excel.
RE 1-2-3 I wote macros for it and remember they had a few decent features in later versions but nope they were beatend fair and square. Funnily enough the other obvious place a MS product whacks the compeditor is Outlook vs Notes. (The Notes client being clearly designed to make the user pay for sins in a prior life).
Other bad uses for Excel
In one place I worked at the company fax template was an Excel document.
I even created a Word template that looked identical but no, the management knew how to use Excel.*
* They didn't, the wasted hours I spent fixing up broken fax docu...sorry...spreadsheets.
Then there was the manager who named every one of his spreadsheets with variations on his own name regardless of function. Not DaveFinanceReport.xls but Dave.xls, Dave1.xls David.xls etc.
When you play the game of thrones,
you win or you die. There is no middle ground.
Excel is typical Windows
It makes the barriers to entry for doing things so low that people without a clue are able to jump in, get involved and mess things up.
Re: Excel is typical Windows
Surely making the barriers low is the (empowering) point of most software? If it is difficult to use then it has not been designed properly.
Re: Excel is typical Windows " jump in, get involved and mess things up"
Or jump in, get involved, learn something, and become wiser as they go.
Swings and roundabouts, as they say :)
Think positive.
Re: Excel is typical Windows " jump in, get involved and mess things up"
I'd say that all places I've worked at where Excel ( and Access/IE6 apps) are used in any anger are seriously limited by them.They are all mission critical bits and pieces that were bodged together in such a way as to be almost completely unmaintainable.
They put you on the ladder to programming heaven but then you discover you cant get the ladder into the lift that even simple software management offers. They are almost physical barriers for turning an SOHO into SME and SME's into E's.
I'd completely forgotten: the earliest versions of Excel had some kind of minimal Windows bundled in so that it would run from the DOS command.
Visicalc, 123, quattro, excel, stagnation
Excel is a bloody good spreadsheet, yes, and has good graphing capabilities.
But once it had 123 and quattro beat it has more or less stood still (Pivot tables? maybe, though they aren't what my maths tutor said pivot tables were)
Calc and Gnumeric are just clones, no-one is breaking new ground.
maths went matlab or Octrave or mathcad, and the proles were left in the 1980s.
Re: Visicalc, 123, quattro, excel, stagnation
For a few years - late 80s, early 90s - Quattro was better than Excel imho, but eventually Excel got an edge and stayed ahead when it added VBA (there was no Quattro equivalent at the time) and Quattro became an also-ran. Although it is still available after being bought by - oh can't remember who, a graphics company.
Never underestimate what VisiCalc did for the PC world - it meant people with just average maths skills could do projections and try a variety of variations without asking the programming department and waiting two or three days for an answer. It kickstarted the concept of a computer on everyone's desk. No more mystical command line /* /a />9.3 /qr rubbish, just straight basic maths and up popped the answer (if you got the brackets in the right places).
Improv
Anyone remember Lotus Improv? Too clever for its own good probably.
Re: Improv
Actually, it became Quantrix. Download a 30 day eval copy and blow your mind, just by following the really good intro doc that comes with it. THIS is how spreadsheets should be, tables with sensible column names like Item, ItemPrice, Quantity and Subtotal, and rules like Subtotal = Quantity * ItemPrice, Total = Sum(Subtotal).
I'm not sad Excel beat 1-2-3. But Improv should have at least made people aware that there is a better way than 'stretching' elementwise formulae over ranges.
Honestly, if you have 10 mins, and you like this sort of thing, check out Quantrix.com. Unfortunately I could never persuade my company to buy it.
I still use Lotus 123 as a primary spreadsheet, and Quattro Pro for my personal use. Excel is for instances where: "oh my gawd! if there is absolutely NO other way" . Have you ever tried plotting with Excel; it sucks BIG time. Yes it can be done, but who in their right mind would ever bother.
"They were focusing their efforts on an OS/2 version of 1-2-3;"
That'll be the one.
They shipped it and by all accounts it was jolly good. Shame nobody bought it, but Lotus had built their empire courtesy of the IBM PC and took the IBM line on what was the GUI OS of the future......oops.
It didn't help that running 123v3 (the three-dimesional one) for DOS under Windows was a right, royal PITA as 123s internal extended memory manager for accessing memory above 640k (thanks Bill!) refused to play nice with Windows. Canning your Windows session and dropping to DOS was the only approach, if not having the whole shebang hang like a professional twatdangler at the drop of a hat was anywhere near important to you.
Moving to Excel meant being able to use a spreadsheet without having to close everything else down first.
The director of the accounts department preferred 123 for Windows as he already knew all the keyboard shortcuts/macros, but the office suite was significantly cheaper to roll out across the company - pretty much the price of either a 123 or word perfect licence, so that was what swung it in our firm rather than all this airy fairy functionality and ease of use stuff which we'd like to think is so important.
15+ years later I still would rather use Threads than Outlook though, it was so much easier to follow a group discussion.
@deadmonkey
15+ years later I still would rather use Threads than Outlook though, it was so much easier to follow a group discussion.
It is entirely the fault of Outhouse that almost everyone who uses EMail (which is almost everyone) thinks that the correct way to refer to a message when replying to it is to include a complete copy of that message (and all the messages to which it is a reply) in that reply -- it's as though RFC822 had never been written. The amount of wasted bandwidth and file storage that this imbecilic duplication has caused around the world is colossal.
I never used threads ... but it can't possibly be as bad as Outlook.
oh god the memories!
Far too many years ago (somewhere around 1992) I was taught how to use 1-2-3 on a college course (along with WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and something else which completely escapes me now). Learning all the keyboard commands was pretty painful, but it seemed amazing to me at the time having never even heard the word spreadsheet before. I vaguely remember the Windows version I used in the real world, but moving to Excel was a bit of a revelation but I hated switching over. Took me ages to learn it too, particularly the more advanced features.
The application market seemed to move pretty quickly back then from what I remember, no sooner had you got used to something then the industry standard changed. Everyone used WordPerfect pretty much then suddenly switched to AmiPro (remember the hidden game?), which was fairly quickly replaced with Word. We saw the same thing in the browser wars (Netscape anyone?) and search engines too.
These days there doesn't feel to be much that's new really or that is a real gamechanger because of the user experience or a particular function. Shame really but I'm very glad that I saw it happen all those years ago.
Fast forward...
If we fast forward to today: MS are adding HPC extensions to Excel, in order that the said same traders (and similar) who want to make more and more complex calculations can have access to clusters of HPC nodes directly from the spreadsheet on their desktop. People who really "know" about HPC are saying that this is terrible and there is no substitute for proper programing, people who "know" about customer service are saying that it's probably the most democritising thing that's happened in IT for a good decade or so.
My point? If the likes of LO and HPC vendors don't sort out their products, they're going to be left behind, obviously the big HPC clusters are always going to be bespoke specialist affairs, but the small and medium could be cleaned up by MS.
Global banking runs on Excel!
Excel was so successful that the financial industry has built entire applications around it that unfortunately may never go away. Global banking runs on Excel! What's worse MS may never even face competition due to such strong vendor lock-in from Excel customisations / VBA / Macros used for business apps and traders spreadsheets etc.
It would be nice to have alternatives in the market as commented in other threads this week regarding a switch to Open Office / Libre Office. But as its been pointed out there are always Formatting incompatibles and that's just the tip of the iceberg...
Its 2013 and yet there's no Office alternative with FUNCTIONALITY that competes with Office head on! Business customisations in Excel have been around for 20+ years, and VBA in its current form for at least 15 years. So what's taken the competitors so long to do little next to nothing regarding these two key areas?
Its like they deliberately chose not to compete with MS head-on, even Google!!! So why even discuss alternatives like Open-Office / Libre - Office if they don't fully support business customisations and VBA / Macros etc? The entire financial industry in built on these types of bloody spreadsheets and we will never get away from MS as long as Excel is the only option... It is the ultimate vendor lock-in!
Re: Global banking runs on Excel!
That pretty much explains why nobody will challenge Office any time soon. As you rightly said, none of the other office packages support this level of integration. When I'm out and about on my Linux netbook, I might use LibreOffice to knock up a basic spreadsheet or document (and then go take a shower to get clean again!) but if I need to do any serious work, it's all done in Office.
VBA is one of the standouts - With an office app + VBA you can build hugely complex applications with a fraction of the complexity of trying to write a native application using VB and Visual Studio. I just wish Microsoft would do a VBA.NET and expose the .NET framework to Office so you can do some of the advanced stuff like on-the-fly crypto and I/O etc.
Re: Global banking runs on Excel!
The article makes the case, though, that Lotus was in a similar position with 1234 at the time, such as the Oracle add-in to 123, and so on, that made it appear to be just as entrenched as current de facto standards are, and yet it still collapsed. We forget how fast changing the technology world really can be. I worked for a financial services company at the time and it's easy to forget how entrenched 123 was.
By the way,t he article fully matches my experience at the time. We held discussions with LDC and MS at the time of the rise of Windows 3, and came away dejected that LDC had no clear way forward while MS not only had good ideas, but understood where they needed to improve. The difference between the companies when you looked at IT strategically at the time was really chalk and cheese.
... I just wish Microsoft would do a VBA.NET ...
Its called Visual Studio Tools for Applications (VSTA). It supports VB.Net & C#.
For some reason MS have chosen to stick with VBA for Office though.
@Callam
Well, tight already mentioned VSTAS and from a personal experience I can also say that you can get quite a bit done with VB.NET (used VS VB.NET 2010 Express for that), although now that I'm evaluating VS 2012 myself I have to admit that there are plenty of advantages to be found there.
But speaking of VBA...
If you want to do crypto or I/O you can, depending on what stuff you have installed. Because Microsoft has provided access to that stuff from within VBA. If you're in the VB editor you can setup references for your project. And that will add functionality to that project.
For example; if you create a reference to the "Groove security context type" library then you'll get quite a bit of encryption support to work with. If you create a reference to, say, the Outlook library then you can suddenly access Outlook right from within Word.
I/O is obviously a bit too broad but depending on what you need chances are high that you'll find a library in that list which you can use. Perhaps the "Microsoft Internet controls" can do what you want..
Investment banking that is
Real banking runs on COBOL and perhaps a bit of Java.
It's just investment banking which runs on Excel.
Re: ... I just wish Microsoft would do a VBA.NET ...
When VSTA was being introduced it was at the same time that .Net was being widely promoted by MS. Now that .Net is has been deprecated by MS, does that mean VSTA also becomes redundant?
What can VSTA do that VBA using reference linking to external libraries can't?
Any EXCEL VSTA / VBA developers reading?
Re: Investment banking that is
Sure, everyday banking operations use COBOL and Java in places to do the day to day routine stuff. But a huge layer of analysis is still done using Excel because of its flexibility. For that I think you'd find most banking users have a copy of Excel on their desktops! Investment Banking is actually quite a small area. I'm talking about Central Bankers, Hedge Funds, Pension Funds, Insurances Houses, financial regulators, so its much larger than just Investment Banks.
Re: Investment banking that is
COBOL.. Yes, but which one is where all the real money is at?
Re: Global banking runs on Excel!
>It is the ultimate vendor lock-in!
Or, as you observe, it's the ultimate vendor lock-out:
>Its like they deliberately chose not to compete
Yes, the hatred of VBA says more about the haters than it does about the hated.
@AC
"Now that .Net is has been deprecated by MS, does that mean VSTA also becomes redundant?"
Deprecated according to who ?
The latest version of Visual Studio, 2012, has recently been introduced as the de-facto platform to use for Windows 8 development. When installing it first makes sure that you have the latest .NET framework (4.5 at the time of writing) and then proceeds, providing full access to both C#.NET, VB.NET as well as ASP.NET.
Microsoft even provides .NET framework targeting packs specifically for Visual Studio 2012, you can get an overview of those here (link to MSDN site).
Sure, maybe MS prefers that people use HTML5 and Javascript to develop stuff for their new Microsoft Store (which can only be done on Windows 8 itself) but that doesn't mean they stopped caring for .NET.
God, I loathe Windows and the Windows way of doing things
But Excel... I liked. It is now the only thing I sometimes boot Windows for, as Libre Office outdoes MS in MS-like awfulness.
Come to think of it, I'm not much taken with God, either, so I don't know why I'm telling him this.
Paris, because even she has some decent software
MS Multiplan
Anyone remember the forerunner to Excel, Microsoft Multiplan? I used it a few times, it was clunky and a dos program, but for basic use it worked fine for the time.
Hmm - MS dirty tricks forgotten?
Seems like too many people forget that MS actually screwed the 3rd party people by telling them "Use the API's we document" - then pulling the plug and using undocumented calls in their own products causing the 3rd party software makers with dung on their face because they were not given the proper documentation.
@alisonken1
I don't think people have forgotten, I think that we simply started to realize that its not only Microsoft who's been doing this.
Re: Hmm - MS dirty tricks forgotten?
Not forgotten: assumed!
It's part of history. Wouldn't know what they get up to these days, but Microsoft was more or less synonymous with dirty tricks. I doubt that much has changed. I'd wouldn't look twice at Ballmer if her was selling second-hand cars.
Re: Hmm - MS dirty tricks forgotten?
Yes, I was one of the users of that era. I think I had an inkling of the MS dirty tricks strategy.. I was constantly noticing that OLE functionality that made copy and pasting sophisticated and/or formatted data objects from one app to another worked insanely well between MS apps (like taking that fancy looking graph from Excel and plopping it into a Word document, or copying 5 lines from Word and pasting it into Excel), but looked like crap for non-MS apps (bad formatting in pasted content, or no pasting at all).
College students like me at that time knew that something weird was going on.
1. Maybe the non-MS app designers weren't thinking long-term, which made no sense, since the software designers of this time were really good.
2. More likely, the API documentation was sorely lacking.
Every user going from Ami Pro to MS Word would think, "Wow, Word looks like crap!", but if they could work through the pain, the inter-operability made Office the only possible winner.
Don't forget printing
I well remember the coming of Lotus 1-2-3 and had a similar experience to the author. We had 1-2-3 in our company. I went to a MS show and saw a demo of Excel, and my jaw dropped. I went back to work and told the boss "we need to get this NOW." We ordered it that day. When it came in, I took it home and stayed up to 5:00 AM Friday night playing with it, something I've not done before or since. I was THAT impressed with Excel.
Remember printing on 1-2-3? It was difficult to do. And if you could get it to print what you wanted, it generally looked like crap, like a report typed in EDLIN. As soon as we had Excel, we could do client-presentation-level spreadsheets quite easily and never looked back at 1-2-3.
1-2-3
To this day I still use some of the various 3-step paths that Excel took directly from Lotus. I miss that little guy (and WordPerfect)
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