VisiCalc; it was...
VisiCalc; it was a mockup that they did) with Charlie Chaplin pushing a button.
When Apple ran an ad, they had Dick Cavett—who had never done ads on TV
before—and he would push a button and up would come VisiCalc on the
screen. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing, I’m sure, but I thought,
“Wow! That was really cool! Dick Cavett!”
One thing that really hit home was when I was going back to the airport
from a conference where Ross Perot had spoken—he was the head of EDS. A
few of us from Software Arts shared a limousine with senior EDS people, and
they knew about VisiCalc. This is EDS, which is the big mainframe company.
They said, “Oh yeah, we did some deal, and we used VisiCalc to do all the calculations
for the deal.” Now, here’s EDS, that has infinite computing power
available, with any software of the big financial forecasting systems, and all that,
and they’re using VisiCalc to price multi-million-dollar deals! I found out
that investment bankers who were doing real deals were using it. When the
people you looked up to as the pros have switched to your stuff, that meant
something.
And the other was when I heard from Don Estridge, who was the head of
the IBM PC project. Don had told me that, when he was about to demonstrate
VisiCalc to one of the real senior people, the executive said, “No, I know how to
do it. Hold on. Let me do it.” And I think he was demoing on an Apple II.
“Whoa!” Then you realize that you did make a mark, and people did get it.
Livingston: VisiCorp and Software Arts had some legal disputes. Is there anything
important that you learned from that?
Bricklin: Stay out of lawsuits if you can help it. It’s bad for both sides, especially
small businesses. That’s lawyers’ business, to them, solving things through lawsuits.
But it’s very, very expensive. It’s a sport of kings, and it uses up a lot of
time. Unless you’re a very big business that can make it a very small part of what
you do, it’s much better to find other ways to solve things. Frequently, individuals
can do it better face to face. People who are the heads of companies understand
that.
The boards involved there let it happen, and they shouldn’t have, since it
ended up being bad for both companies.
Livingston: And it distracted you.
Bricklin: Distracted? It killed us.
We had just finished negotiating a deal to sell our company, for cash—a lot
of cash—to a major company. It would have changed the whole industry. We
had been approached by H&R Block to buy our company for, I think, $50 million
| ← he would run | in cash, plus → |