Esther Dyson,Phil Kenneth Salin
Now that spreadsheets are a fairly mature market and most of the fighting
is for market share, Lotus is about to announce a technology that could
radically improve its position in the cutthroat spreadsheet market. No,
it’s not a Windows version of Improv, which lets an individual do awesome
things with the data on his own, but rather a new technology/feature for
1-2-3 called Chronicle, which lets an individual share not just his data
but his assumptions with others. Chronicle was championed and developed
within Frank King’s R&D organization by Irene Greif, formerly with MIT, and
her 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 the
conflicts and dependencies in scenarios 1, 2 and 3?
How do you combine
Juan’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 the
bottom 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’s
office instead of applying it to the widget department; how would operating
costs look then?
What if we scrap the intelligent widget project and invest in pens?
The permutations and combinations of different people’s assumptions
sible to and scenarios
can
manage.
rapidly
become
incomprehensible
—
and
impos-
The Chronicle technology fits in between a file manager, which treats each
spreadsheet as a monolithic object,
and a database, which de facto treats
each cell of a spreadsheet as a discrete data element.
Working within a
single spreadsheet, the technology manages a set of modules that can be
selected and combined to compose a spreadsheet.
It manages the integrity
of each assumption-set and controls conflicts among them just as a database
maintains the integrity of data elements, with each item a discrete piece.
That is, it does not eliminate the conflicts,
but keeps them from messing
up the whole — much as Alice could believe eight impossible things before
breakfast behind the looking-glass.
