Founders at Work.pdf

94 Founders at Work
So we decided to bet on doing something for the IBM PC, which proved to
be one of the reasons why we were successful. They had decided to outsource a
lot of the key elements of what they were doing, right to the distribution.
Rather than selling it just through their own sales force, they were selling it
through retail stores like Computer-Land and Sears, which at the time was a
very radical idea. They had gone to Intel for the microprocessor; they had gone
to Microsoft for the principal operating system. And I said, “They’re smart.
They realize they don’t understand this business, so they’ll go to the best
people. They’re not going to have a lot of ego, and this is the way things are
going to work.” Also, they had put a 16-bit chip in the machine with greater
memory capacity. And memory capacity was an enormous issue.
The Apple II had 64K—not megabytes, kilobytes—of memory. It was tiny.
And not all of that was available. Actually, if you wrote programs on the
Apple II, you started with a 48K memory space. So the programs were tiny and
the user data was tiny and people were building spreadsheets that exceeded
memory. It was a fundamental limit of the Apple II, because it was an 8-bit
microprocessor. IBM used a 16-bit microprocessor and I said, “Ah, this will
permit people to build bigger spreadsheets.” The memory space of the IBM PC
when it came out was 640K, 10 times the size. So I said, “16-bit, faster processor,
more memory says IBM. We should target it. We should build a product
that is optimized for it.”
Now, the IBM PC came out day one, August ’81, with a version of VisiCalc,
and with a version of MultiPlan, which was Microsoft’s spreadsheet, but neither
of them took advantage of the full capabilities of the IBM PC. In particular,
because they had been put under a lot of pressure to get a product out, they had
taken the code for the 8080/Z80 Intel/Zilog processors—8-bit code—and
tweaked it a little bit. The point is that VisiCalc on an IBM PC still ran in 64K
of memory. You had 640K available, but you couldn’t address it in a spreadsheet,
so it was as if it wasn’t there. And I said, “This is really an opportunity
here.”
Plus another factor: because I knew all of the individuals, I knew that
Software Arts and Personal Software were fighting with each other over the
royalty rate. And I knew that they were essentially distracted and they were not
working together, and I knew that Personal Software was hiring its own developers.
I felt guilt-ridden about coming out with a product that was going to be
competitive with VisiCalc, so I did my best to pretend to myself that it wasn’t
going to be competitive. I ultimately said to myself that the fact of the matter is
that I didn’t create this opportunity, they did. If they had been on the job, I
would have gone and done something else because the opportunity wouldn’t
have been there. But I saw a gap in the marketplace and I said, “We should do
something that lets you do bigger spreadsheets, that’s faster, that takes full
advantage of the IBM PC, that integrates the graphing, so you could hit one
button to get a graph”—because I knew people wanted that—“and have a
better user interface for non-expert users”—which we did—“and allow user
customization and user programming”—which we did in the macro language.
So there was a set of ideas that gave 1-2-3 its character, that really made it a