thing and go,...
thing and go, “This is a very big ambitious thing. We don’t really think he has
the ability to pull this off. This gets us what we need, and for the sake of getting
the deal done, we’ll sign off on it.” So basically, I told them what I was going to
do, taking advantage of the fact that I didn’t think they would take me seriously,
because I know they didn’t take me seriously. And that’s what actually
happened.
It just goes to show you shouldn’t underestimate people. You shouldn’t
judge from appearances like that.
Livingston: So now that you were free and clear, what were the first things that
you did?
Kapor: Jon had implemented spreadsheets previously; he was one of the few
people. And that’s how I knew him. But he had made the mistake of being in a
business with technical people and no business people. He had been at Data
General, and the first spreadsheet that they implemented was for the Data
General minicomputer. Well, there was no market for that.
And then Sachs and his partner were sort of going, “What do we do now?
This didn’t work.” I forget how I ran into Sachs, but I convinced him to come
workor my fledgling little thing. Remember, I had the royalties. He had some
ideas; I had some ideas; we succeeded in spite of ourselves.
I was so convinced that VisiCalc had a lock on the market that I had to convince
myself that we were going to do something that wasn’t fundamentally a
spreadsheet. Of course, what we did was fundamentally a spreadsheet, but the
self-deception I engaged in wasn’t sufficiently damaging to be fatal. But there
was a big push to call it integrated software, to add other capabilities, to wrap
other things in it.
The galvanizing event was when IBM announced the IBM PC in August
1981. It was very important in the history of PCs because it legitimized the
whole field—because of IBM’s imprimatur. Until then, the personal computer
hardware companies were Apple, Tandy, and Commodore. IBM was the first
“real” computer company to come out with a PC, legitimizing it for the business
marketplace. And that was not lost on me.
Mitchell Kapor 93
So we decided to bet on doing something for the IBM PC, which proved to
be one of the reasons why we were successful. They had decided to outsource a
lot of the key elements of what they were doing, right to the distribution.
Rather than selling it just through their own sales force, they were selling it
through retail stores like Computer-Land and Sears, which at the time was a
very radical idea. They had gone to Intel for the microprocessor; they had gone
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