Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Trends in Personal Computer Software
Trends in Personal Computer Software
Pages 28-35
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From page 28... ...
Products developed through a more structured approach, which included a marketing requirements document and a formal development team- that is, products with good methoc3 * Mitchell Kapor is president of Lotus Development Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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From page 29... ...
a graphing command in it." That was our market research. This peculiar situation may stem from the fact that no one can be taught how to design a personal computer software product.
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Writing such an application is an art as well as an exercise in trial and error; software designers are like medieval artisans. There is also a subjective and psychological element in the development of software products that please users.
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The idea for Visicalc came out of creator Dan Bricklancl's head, was realized as a product, and now has several million quite happy electronic spreadsheet users. Visicalc could not have been developed by going out and cloing market research.
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If by learning one set of commands you can access database data in a spreadsheet, make graphs from a spreadsheet, and incorporate pieces of the database into your word processor, you have a much more versatile product. There seems to be general agreement that the five applications spreadsheet, database, word processing, graphics, and communication while not exhaustive, answer basic productivity needs.
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There is further agreement, I think, that integrated products as application have to be open-ended! so that they can connect in clifferent ways to other applications, to vertical market products, to mainframes, to minicomputers, to voice.
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In the near future, ~ think it is safe to say that organizations may have their own staffs of application developers. They will want to create custom applications for their own corporate needs or they may wish to create applications in some vertical market and sell them.
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The first, stumbling effort Lotus macle in this direction was to inclu(le a macrolanguage with 1-2-3 that contained the rudiments of a formal programming language, control structures, variables assignments, and user interface primitives. It is clumsy and anything but elegant, but it is being used in corporations far more than we ever could have predicted.
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