VideoIt's like walking across the United States and you come to the Grand Canyon and you say, "Oh, this is really cool! I wonder what other cool things we're going to find!" But there's only one Grand Canyon.
A Thousand Times Better, and Counting
The electronic spreadsheet may be ubiquitous—Microsoft estimates there are 400 million users of its Office product worldwide, which includes the now-dominant Excel spreadsheet along with Word and other desktop applications—but when Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were developing VisiCalc, it was a decidedly regional affair. Mitch Kapor was among the Boston-area technophiles who got an early look, and he recalls, "I was just blown away. It was a thousand times better than the graphical and statistics program I was developing at the time."
Kapor couldn't have known it then, but he would go on to become nearly as identified with the electronic spreadsheet as its creators, thanks to his role as co-founder of Lotus Development Corp., the company that made the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet a corporate staple. While the Lotus version added macros, graphing, and other improvements to the spreadsheet, Kapor maintains that it has not fundamentally changed in the past 25 years. But, he adds, that doesn't mean it can't. Joe Krawczak of Microsoft says the company plans continual enhancements to Excel, many of them designed to make it easier to get data into spreadsheets and to share them. In fact, while its rows and columns may comprise thousands of cells, the spreadsheet itself is still, in Kapor's words, "the equivalent of a single-cell organism, with plenty of room to evolve." —S.L.
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