Release 1.0

Description

CHRONICLE: DO YOU KNOW WHAT I KNOW?Now that spreadsheets are a fairly mature market and most of the fightingis for market share, Lotus is about to announce a technology that couldradically improve its position in the cutthroat spreadsheet market. No,it’s not a Windows version of Improv, which lets an individual do awesomethings with the data on his own, but rather a new technology/feature for1-2-3 called Chronicle, which lets an individual share not just his databut his assumptions with others. Chronicle was championed and developedwithin Frank King's R&D organization by Irene Greif, formerly with MIT, andher team. It’s part of the solid groundwork King leaves to John Landry.The basic concept is simple:How do you get the software to maintain theconflicts and dependencies in scenarios 1, 2 and 3?How do you combineJuan's assumptions on costs (he’s the purchasing agent) with Alice’s knowledge of customer price elasticity (she’s the one in the field)?What’s thebottom line if Russia does better than expected but Italy does worse?Suppose you want to go back to your earlier pricing model but keep your current sales forecasts?Suppose you charged the overhead to the chairman'soffice instead of applying it to the widget department; how would operatingcosts look then?What if we scrap the intelligent widget project and invest in pens?The permutations and combinations of different people's assumptionssible to and scenarioscanmanage.rapidlybecomeincomprehensible--andimpos-The Chronicle technology fits in between a file manager, which treats eachspreadsheet as a monolithic object,and a database, which de facto treatseach cell of a spreadsheet as a discrete data element.Working within asingle spreadsheet, the technology manages a set of modules that can beselected and combined to compose a spreadsheet.It manages the integrityof each assumption-set and controls conflicts among them just as a databasemaintains the integrity of data elements, with each item a discrete piece.That is, it does not eliminate the conflicts,but keeps them from messingup the whole -- much as Alice could believe eight impossible things beforebreakfast behind the looking-glass.