Re: The IBM PC's slavish devotion to the Apple II

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Chuck Morris wrote:

<snip>

>All of that changed when Visicalc came out.  IMHO, this is the first true
>"Killer App" of the personal computing era.  Now there was a readily
>available tool that businesses could use to crunch their business data in
>ways that they could define themselves, and in significantly less time than
>the same results could be compiled by hand.  This was the spark that
>convinced a great many businesses that the purchase of a computer for the
>office was justified, and not only justified, but essential to their ability
>to run their business more effectively.  Suddenly there was a real business
>market to be pursued, and nobody had yet established dominance in that
>market.

I think you'll find little argument that Visicalc was the first "Killer App".
In fact, the term "Killer App" was actually engendered by the Visicalc
phenomenon.  ;-)

>The IBM PC was a beneficiary of this development in the market, no doubt.  I
>believe that IBM was already working on developing the PC prior to this
>point with the hope of being able to make sales in the business world, but I
>suspect that they had no better idea of how to cause businesses to lust
>after their machines than Apple had.  As it turned out, neither they nor
>Apple had to create the market from scratch, thanks to the arrival of
>Visicalc.

IBM was not enamoured with the personal computer as an idea.  The
very idea of a computer under the personal control of its single user is
somewhat at odds with the corporate mainframe, tended by its IT
acolytes, and accessed only by "approved" aplications.

The groundswell of interest in using personal computers in the big
business environment was a challenge to the _status quo_ of
corporate computing of which IBM was a principal author and
beneficiary.  When a "what if" financial question was posed in
1980, say in a boardroom or an executive committee, the normal
response was to either 1) take a SWAG at an answer based on
some back-of-the-envelope estimates, or 2) ask the IT department
to design an application which would access the corporate data
and crunch the numbers under the "what if" scenario to see what
the result would be.

The first approach produced wildly inaccurate "guesstimates" while
the second approach usually resulted in a 1-6 month IT timetable
for implementation, which pretty well killed the question.

When division heads and their financial aides discovered Visicalc,
they found that they could put together a reasonable model, type in
the official numbers from existing corporate database reports, and
get the result before the meeting adjourned.  This was truly a
revolution in decision making power.