SocialCalc Comes Out of Beta, Marking 30th Anniversary of VisiCalc, the first Spreadsheet Technology

Written by Alex Williams / October 19, 2009 12:37 PM / 4 Comments

On this day 30 years ago, Dan Bricklin's VisiCalc spreadsheet program changed the way people thought about computers and how they applied to business.

Bricklin remains a leader in the field and on this anniversary date is seeing his SocialCalc technology come out of beta and become a fully developed product from Socialtext, the company he has collaborated with since 2006.

The news coincides with the Microsoft announcement that Sharepoint 2010 provides the the capability to co-edit Excel documents.

SocialCalc is a social spreadsheet designed for distributed teams. Typically, companies using Excel have had to save their versions and email the document to other members of the team. Each time an update is made, a new version of the document is created.

SocialCalc provides the ability for users to collaborate across a number of spreadsheets. Users may do this in conjunction with the wiki-based Socialtext Workspace, and Socialtext Signals, their microblogging platform.

Sharepoint will offer a co-editing feature through its integration with Office 2010. In a demo from the Sharepoint conference in Las Vegas, the Microsoft team showed how multiple people can edit an Excel document simultaneously. It is still not entirely clear how rich this feature set is in comparison to products from Google, eXpresso and EditGrid. Both eXpresso and EditGrid are stand alone applications.

In comparison, Google's spreadsheet product is as close as it gets to the Socialtext offering but lacks SocialCalc's ability to keep track of revision histories.

Bernard Lunn wrote last week that Google is missing the boat by not focusing on the spreadsheet market. Microsoft has not put tremendous energies into making its Excel spreadsheets more collaborative but it appears it is also a notch behind what Socialtext offers.

According to Socialtext, SocialCalc is immediately available for trial and for current customers in the October Appliance release. It costs $3 per user per month. New customers who purchase the full Socialtext platform in 2009 get SocialCalc without charge for 2010. Current customers that participated in the beta program get SocialCalc without charge for 2009.

Comments

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Google's spreadsheet does have revision functionality. Look under File -> See Revision History. Is it as robust as SocialCalc's? Don't know, I haven't used SocialCalc.

Posted by: Tim | October 19, 2009 8:38 PM

Ya there are some functions of excel spreadsheet which are not included in Google's spreadsheet. I read somewhere that they are updating it.

Posted by: tea bags | October 20, 2009 2:22 AM

I was lucky to interview Dan Bricklin about this for Rocketboom when it was called wickicalc in Febriary of 2006.

http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/2006/02/video-dan-bricklin-on-rocketboom.html

Posted by: steve Garfield | October 20, 2009 4:19 AM

Thanks for the mention in this article, Alex!

You said it was not clear to you how their feature set compares to eXpresso, so I thought I would briefly share our perspective. Here are three main differences we see with SocialCalc:

1. It's not Excel. People would have to learn how to use SocialCalc instead of continuing to use what they already know.

2. According to the video, it appears you need to create multiple spreadsheets for different audiences. That sounds like more work to us. With eXpresso, you can setup one spreadsheet file to fit many different audiences by customizing how each person can consume the same file. No need to keep track of multiple files and make sure the links between them work. (e.g. Manufacturers really love this feature.)

3. Users lose fidelity of their Excel file when using editors like Google, Zoho, or SocialCalc. Nothing will display an Excel file like Excel, and you can continue to create, edit, and share Excel with eXpresso. That's not only important for future files but also for the billions of files people have created in the past.

For more about how eXpresso is different, please visit our blog: http://blog.expressocorp.com/

Submitted by Gus S, Sr Product Manager at eXpresso.

Posted by: eXpresso Corp | October 20, 2009 11:18 AM