Founders at Work.pdf

78 Founders at Work
Livingston: You incorporated over your winter break, right?
Bricklin: Yes. When I graduated business school, I graduated as chairman of
the board with no salary. We announced the product on Monday, and I graduated
Wednesday or Thursday, something like that. The first time it was shown
to the public was at the National Computer Conference in June of 1979. It had
actually been announced privately at Ben Rosen’s conference and then shown
at the West Coast Computer Faire in May of ’79, but only shown to dealers
behind closed doors.
Livingston: When you were giving these private demos, was there any part of
the demo where you just saw the audience say, “Oh my God”?
Bricklin: It depends on the audience. We announced it at the National
Computer Conference; it was written up by a Morgan Stanley analyst in the
summer . . . you think it would be mentioned in any publication? A business
publication? No. Eventually, in a publicity thing about the software publishing
that Personal Software was doing, BusinessWeek mentioned it a little bit. And
eventually Fortune magazine and Inc. ran stories that we were featured in on
the business of publishing software. But, the concept that the spreadsheet as a
type of software was available (other than in the personal computing software
magazines like Byte or Creative Computing) just wasn’t mentioned. I think
Forbes finally mentioned it in a comparison of new computers—did it have
VisiCalc or not? So it sort of was missed.
People who saw it, who needed it, got it. Sorry, no—some of the people who
needed it got it. You have to be a person who is able to look at a generalpurpose
tool and be able to think, “How would I use that to solve my problem?”
Most people are not that way. They look for a tool that is being used already for
something close to their problem and then understand what it is. Many people
who saw the spreadsheet with an example, if the example wasn’t in their field,
they couldn’t make the leap. Because they’re not programmers in their mind.
But, if you showed it to somebody where it clicked, either because they
understood the general-purpose nature and could apply it to their own needs,
or you showed them an example, like financial forecasting or something that
they did, and they knew the other tools in the world, they got very excited. If
you showed it to a computer person who didn’t have those needs, they’d say,
“That’s kind of cool, but what’s so special about that? I could just do it in Basic.”
Now, there were those that hadn’t seen as interactive a computer before,
weren’t as aware of word processing and some of the other things, and, when
they saw it, it really opened up their minds to what you could do interactively
with computers. Jean-Louis Gassée, who went to Apple, is one of the people
who says that.
There were those people—not that many, but enough that it got a lot of
people going in computer software. And then there were people—the general
public—who thought computers could do everything, and they weren’t at all
surprised. They’d say, “Well, of course, computers can do so much more than
that. What’s special?” Luckily for us, the people who funded things—the MBA
types got it, the investment banker types got it, because this was something they
would need. And that made them get the personal computer.