Computer Chronicles Revisited 109 — Microsoft Excel 2.0, MacDraw II, and Cricket Presents

In early 1987, Apple planned to publish a database management program called Silver Surfer, which was developed by Acius. This prompted blowback from a number of third-party Macintosh developers, who felt that Apple should “stick to hardware” and leave the software to them. Unlike the Apple of today, then-CEO John Sculley’s company in 1987 could only go so far to antagonize the third-party developers necessary to keep the Macintosh platform viable. So Apple abandoned plans to publish Silver Surfer under its own label and returned the rights to Acius, who released the database under the name 4th Dimension.

The Silver Surfer affair prompted Sculley and his executives to spin off its “private label” software business into a new company, which they named Claris. In December 1987, Claris moved out of Apple’s Cupertino, California, offices to nearby Mountain View, and on January 11, 1988, the new company officially opened for business.

Aside from appeasing third-party developers, Apple hoped that Claris’ independence would help revive the sagging fortunes of what had once been the Macintosh’s signature applications, including MacDraw. Back in June 1985, then-Apple product manager Merein Cremer appeared on Computer Chronicles to demonstrate the original version of MacDraw, a vector graphics package commonly used to create business charts and presentations. In the three years since, however, a number of third-party developers had entered the booming market for business graphics on the Mac, prompting Claris to release a complete rewrite of the program, MacDraw II, as one of its first products in early 1988.

No More Need for “Manual” Tools?

MacDraw II was one of several programs demonstrated in this next Computer Chronicles episode from April 1988. This was the first in a two-part look at business graphics. As had become standard practice by now, Chronicles devoted one episode to applications for the Macintosh, and another for IBM PC-compatible software.

Stewart Cheifet recorded his cold open at an unidentified commercial graphics shop, where he noted you wouldn’t find many traditional design tools like a T-square or pens and pencils. What you found instead were computers and graphics software. Increasingly, Cheifet said, commercial artists were trading in their “manual” tools for mice and keyboards.

In the studio, Cheifet showed Gary Kildall a number of these supposedly outdated manual tools, including the aforementioned T-square, which Cheifet said the graphics house he visited used to pull printer cables from behind their desks.

Cheifet asked Kildall how to compare business graphics to other applications like desktop publishing, computer-aided design, drawing programs, and so forth. Kildall noted that in business, you primarily dealt in numbers, which represented objects, such as how many bags of flour you sold. Today, with high-resolution graphics on PCs, you could now represent those objects and concepts more clearly when it came to presentations.

Illustrator Streamlines Clothing Design Process

Wendy Woods presented her first remote segment from Esprit, a San Francisco-based clothing company, which used Adobe Illustrator. Woods said that in the fiercely competitive fashion business, the need to bring new products out quickly was often at odds with the need to make continuing changes to a design, often until the last minute.

That’s why designers at Esprit adopted the Macintosh II and Adobe Illustrator to help streamline their work. Jim Charles, a designer with Esprit, told Woods that when the company first brought the Mac into the design room, he didn’t know what he was going to do with the machine. He was frustrated that a lot of the fashion business had to do with quick changes, many of which were simple and subtle, such as changing a color.

Woods said using software like Illustrator, which can manipulate free-form shapes, a designer could experiment with different patterns, forms, and colors before committing them to cloth. That kind of flexibility brought changes to a workplace like Esprit, where much of the product still depended on a paintbrush and a sewing machine. Charles said the biggest changes were in how the designers thought and looked at what they did. The software helped to suggest a more logical way of developing a design–or at least thinking about design concepts.

But the regularity of a computer-generated design, Woods said, was not always an advantage. Sometimes designers wanted patterns that lacked the computer’s mathematical perfection, i.e., which have a “hand touch.” Still, the Macintosh demonstrated the computer’s special talents in more ways than one. As an example, Charles said that if he had a meeting tonight for artwork going out tomorrow, and all that needed to be changed was the color, he could simply bring up the design in Illustrator and make the change instantly. This was much simpler than having an artist come back in and repaint the entire item over again.

Business Charts…Now in Color!

Merein Cermer and Pradeep Singh joined Cheifet and Kildall in the studio for the next segment. Cremer had moved from Apple to Claris, where she remained the product manager for what was now MacDraw II. Singh was a product manager at Microsoft for the company’s latest Macintosh spreadsheet program, Microsoft Excel 2.0.

Kildall noted that both companies were demonstrating second-generation software. What have the customers asked for in these latest business graphics programs? Singh said that in the most immediate sense, support for the latest hardware, such as the full-color Macintosh II, as well as Apple’s new multitasking operating system, MultiFinder. Singh felt the underlying Excel product was already a strong business graphics product, so there didn’t need to be much basic change to the underlying functionality. Of course, the 2.0 version did do a lot other stuff, but the focus of his demonstration today was business graphics.

Kildall asked Singh for that demo. Singh pulled up a simple spreadsheet, a table containing an insurance premium analysis over a 20-year period. Singh noted that a table with numbers did not make a strong impact. So he made a chart out of it. He selected the data and had Excel produce a column chart. Singh noted that the program made a number of “intelligent decisions,” such as the axes of the chart. The user could also customize the chart through additional options, such as adding a legend.

Singh noted that Excel had a selection of pre-built chart types, including options to overlay one chart on top of another. Using his demonstration spreadsheet, he overlaid a column chart on top of an area chart. He then showed off some of the cosmetic options the user could configure, such as changing the font size of the chart’s text and adding shadows to the graphical bars. Finally, Singh showed a completed chart, including text boxes and a background.

Kildall asked about options when it came to making a hard copy of an Excel chart. How could you make something like transparencies or slides? Singh said Excel supported a number of output devices, such as a Tektronix thermal printer. He showed Kildall some sample printouts. You could also use a dot-matrix printer, which was a cheaper option than thermal printing but did not produce the same quality level.

Kildall added you could use a laser printer to make transparencies. Singh said that was true, but the laser printer’s output was only in black and white. Color laser printing was coming, but it wasn’t here yet.

As Cremer set up her own demo, Cheifet asked Singh if you could run Excel 2.0 on a Macintosh SE, or did you need the more powerful Macintosh II to take advantage of the advanced graphics? Singh said the program worked just as well on the SE. The main advantage of the Macintosh II was that it had color graphics, while the SE was restricted to black and white.

Cheifet then turned to Cremer and asked about the changes to MacDraw II versus the original product. Cremer said the key changes involved enhancements to speed, precision, and flexibility. But Claris tried not to sacrifice the ease of use that made MacDraw a success in the first place.

Cremer then began her demo by showing a color image of a train scrolling from left to right on the Macintosh II display. She noted this showed off the improvements to speed in MacDraw II. The screen did not have to redraw itself every time you moved the image around.

Next, to demonstrate improvements to ease of use, Cremer pulled up an outline of a world map that was missing Australia. She opened a library of existing images, selected one of Australia, and copied and pasted it on top of the world map image.

MacDraw II also had a layering feature. This allowed the user to place transparency overlays on top of an image. Cremer demonstrated this by adding a transparency layer with text and lines on top of the world map image. By doing this, Cremer said the user did not destroy the underlying image, which could be used over and over again.

In terms of improvements to precision, Cremer said the user could now zoom into part of an image with up to 3,200-percent magnification of its original size. This allowed for making precise adjustments of the individual vector lines used to create MacDraw II images. Cremer then demonstrated improvements made to the handling of text in MacDraw II, such as the ability to rotate a text box to any angle, as well as the addition of color.

Kildall noted that one of the advantages of a drawing program as opposed to a paint program was the ability to perform these types of vector-based changes. Did Cremer actually see drawing programs replacing paint programs? Cremer said no, as drawing programs focused on making bitmap graphics. But MacDraw II did allow a user to bring in scanned bitmap images of any resolution into a vector drawing file.

Reiterating his earlier question to Singh, Chefeft asked Cremer about users with a Macintosh SE or older model, which still represented the majority of Mac users. Were there still advantages for them in using MacDraw II? Cremer said definitely, all of the features demonstrated translated back to the Macintosh Plus and the Macintosh SE. You could even do color patterns on a Macintosh Plus, which were represented by letter patterns on the black-and-white display.

Kildall asked Cremer about the typical customer for MacDraw II. Cremer said it was used for everything from presentation graphics to desktop publishing, as well as low-level computer-aided design.

Cheifet asked about the minimum memory requirements for MacDraw II. Cremer said you needed at least 1 MB. Cheifet followed up, asking if there was any way for an existing MacDraw user to upgrade to MacDraw II. Cremer said yes, Claris offered a $100 upgrade, while purchasing the program brand new cost $395. (MacDraw originally retailed for $195.)

Make Your Own Slides for the Low Cost of $5,000

Wendy Woods returned for her second and final remote segment. This time, she was at LifeScan, a San Francisco-based company that made a hand-held blood sugar tester for diabetics. Woods noted the company’s product, known as One Touch, had been so successful that LifeScan had doubled in size in just a few years.

Woods said much of the credit for the company’s growth was due to the management and sales teams, which designed the presentations that impressed their customers. For this purpose, LifeScan product manager Eric Meyer used ImageMaker from Sunnyvale, California-based Presentation Technologies.

ImageMaker was a desktop slide-making system that could put color graphics created on a Macintosh directly onto 35mm film. This in-house slide product offered LifeScan two big advantages. First, Meyer told Woods, he could control the entire process. You could go right from having something in your head to something on the screen and get exactly what you had in mind on the slide. You weren’t working through an intermediary. Second, Meyer said there was a substantial cost savings. It cost about $20 to $30 per slide to use an outside company. With the ImageMaker, after accounting for the fixed costs, that per-slide cost went down to about 50 cents.

Woods said that unlike other slide-making systems on the market, the $5,000 ImageMaker used a special photo-optical technology with font cartridges that created crisp, 8,000-resolution line images. Woods added that Presentation Technologies said it was shipping about 2,000 ImageMakers per month, which was pretty good for a product this new and this expensive. It was an indication that desktop slide-making was a concept that corporate America was quickly embracing.

Cricket Presents the Future of Business Presentations

For the final segment, Darragh Muldoon and Barry Schuler joined Cheift and Kildall in the studio. Muldoon was the co-founder and president of Pennsylvania-based Cricket Software, which published the business graphics package Cricket Presents. Schuler was Cricket’s chief executive officer.

Kildall asked Muldoon if you had to be an artist to use a business graphics program. Muldoon said if you wanted to do incredible sophisticated stuff it would be helpful, but in general you didn’t need artistic skill to use software like Cricket Presents, which came with templates and drawing tools.

Kildall followed up, asking if Cricket had a particular customer profile. Muldoon said no, their goal was to grab the whole market. She added that Cricket Presents worked for everyone from someone who wanted to create simple black-and-white transparencies with an Apple LaserWriter printer to more sophisticated users working in corporate art departments to create color transparencies and 35mm slides.

Schuler then conducted a demonstration of Cricket Presents. He said a typical user would begin creating a presentation using the software’s built-in outline processor. Schuler already had a sample outline started. The next step was to begin building individual “frames” or slides. Cricket Presents had a built-in template library. The templates included formats for the frames, such as placing a headline, bullet points, and a space to insert graphics. Users could also design and save their own templates.

Schuler explained how a user could copy items directly from their outlines into a frame, such as pasting them into bullet points. Cheifet asked if there were defaults for the fonts. Schuler said yes, the template pre-selected the fonts, colors, and other formatting elements, but the user could always go in and change them.

Cricket Presents also had a built-in graphing tool. Schuler explained this also relied on the program’s templates. For example, a user could select a pre-made bar graph and insert it into a frame. Double clicking on the inserted graph then opened a separate data worksheet window, where the user could input data specific to their presentation. Cheifet described it as a built-in spreadsheet. Schuler clarified it didn’t have the mathematical functions of a spreadsheet, but it would allow you to input and format data. He then showed how you could use color drawing tools in Cricket Presents to add an arrow to the frame.

Kildall asked if it was possible to import graphics and text from other programs into Cricket Presents. Schuler said there were “very powerful” importing features. The software supported a number of popular file formats, such as PICT, PICT2, and MacPaint. To demonstrate, he imported a black-and-white PICT file created with another program and used a feature in Cricket Presents to colorize the image by assigning individual colors to the patterns that appeared. Cheifet quipped it was the equivalent of colorizing old black-and-white movies. (Schuler jokingly replied Ted Turner would love this.)

Beyond creating individual frames, Schuler said Cricket Presents also had a “note view” that opened a text editor for the person giving the presentation to write their accompanying speech or store presenter notes.

Wrapping things up, Cheifet asked Muldoon if there was a boom in presentation graphics software like Cricket Presents similar to what had been seen in desktop publishing. Muldoon said definitely, but the market could still be larger. She noted business executives were more likely to give a presentation than publish a newsletter.

Why Cricket Wasn’t the Future of Business Presentations

If the demonstration of Cricket Presents sounded a lot like Microsoft PowerPoint, well, in an alternate universe Cricket Presents might have been Microsoft PowerPoint–or maybe Microsoft Presents. In fact, Bill Gates actually tried to acquire Cricket Software before purchasing PowerPoint’s original developer instead.

But let’s back up a bit. In 1983, Darragh Muldoon quit her accounting job to join Heyden & Son Inc., a Philadelphia-based distributor of scientific and technical books, as its new business manager. It was at Heyden that Muldoon met Jim Rafferty, a Ph.D student in chemistry at the University of Maryland, who would become her partner in co-founding Cricket Software.

Rafferty told MacWorld in a 1988 interview that he developed his interest in computers during graduate school. In particular, he was enamored with the pre-release hype surrounding the Apple Macintosh. When the Mac finally launched in January 1984, Rafferty said he was “in line before my local Apple dealer opened, waiting with a check for $2,498 in my hand.”

Rafferty decided the best use for his new Mac was to develop a graphics program for data analysis, something that previously required a mainframe computer. Rafferty dropped out of Maryland and spent the next 15 months developing his program in Pascal. The finished application, which he called StatWorks, was then distributed by Heyden & Son.

Shortly thereafter, Rafferty and Muldoon decided to go into business together, forming Cricket Software in May 1985. (Rafferty said people had called him “Jiminy Cricket” since he was a child, hence the company’s name.) Muldoon, the new company’s president, took out a second mortgage on her home to fund the startup. Rafferty, who took the title of chairman, contributed an additional $20,000 in equipment, and the pair borrowed another $50,000 from the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation.

The company’s first product, Cricket Graph, debuted in January 1986, to positive reviews and sales. A second product, Cricket Draw, soon followed. After just two months, Cricket Software was profitable, and by early 1987 the company reported $6 million in annual sales. By the time Muldoon appeared on Computer Chronicles in April 1988, the company had 60 employees and had recently relocated to a 30,000 square-foot facility in the Philadelphia suburb of Malvern.

Cricket Software’s meteoric rise sparked attention from across the country. In 1986, the aforementioned Bill Gates asked Muldoon and Rafferty if they were interested in selling their nascent company to Microsoft. They said no. Six months later, Gates asked a second time. Again, they said no.

Rafferty later claimed another bidder, whom he declined to identify, offered $18 million to buy out Muldoon and himself. Once again, the answer was “no.” Media reports speculated the would-be buyer might have been Lotus Development Corporation or Adobe Systems, the latter of whom published Illustrator.

Entering 1988, however, Muldoon and Rafferty realized they might be in over their heads running a rapidly growing software company with no prior experience. So that’s when they brought in Barry Schuler. He was already well-known to the Cricket founders, as Schuler ran the firm that handled the company’s advertising.

Originally from New Jersey, Schuler studied psychology at Rutgers University, which he then weaponized into a career in advertising and marketing. After graduating from Rutgers in 1976, he started his first company, CMP Communications, which initially produced industrial and commercial films. After reading an article in Popular Mechanics on how to build your own microcomputer, however, Schuler pivoted CMP’s business to providing marketing and advertising services for startup tech companies, including Cricket Software.

Schuler left CMP in March 1988 to join Cricket as its new president and chief executive officer, with Muldoon assuming the title of vice chairman. This was not long–maybe a couple of weeks–before Schuler and Muldoon appeared on Computer Chronicles to demonstrate Cricket Presents. That was no coincidence. Presents had been in development for some time under the code name DOM, which stood for “deadline-oriented moron,” a reference to the product’s target market of “procrastinating middle manager[s] up against a deadline to prepare a presentation,” according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Cricket started shipping Presents to retailers in April 1988, and Schuler mounted a full-court press to sell what was now the company’s flagship product.

Indeed, Schuler spared no expense marketing Presents, spending millions on advertising and trade shows and more than doubling the company’s sales and marketing staff in just eight months. Initially, the campaign seemed to work. Cricket reported shipping 10,000 units of Presents to retailers in each of its first two months on the market. Unfortunately, many of those copies then languished on store shelves as those procrastinating middle managers procrastinated over shelling out $495 for yet another business graphics program.

But the real problem was how much Cricket spent marketing Presents. Barry Borden, a consultant for Cricket at the time, told MacWEEK that the company booked about $4 million in revenue on Presents during April and May 1988, but by June the marketing costs exceeded $1 million per month as new sales slowed to a trickle. By the end of 1988, Cricket reported a $2 million loss on just $10 million in sales.

To add insult to injury, Schuler brought in venture capital to help fund his marketing push. In the summer of 1988, he convinced Muldoon and Rafferty to sell roughly one-third of Cricket Software to a Boston venture capital firm, the Summit Group, for $4 million. The company also put itself up for sale at an asking price of $30 million.

According to a June 1989 postmortem by the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Valerie Reitman, Rafferty believed that bringing in the venture capitalists was a mistake, as “the company got into a financial bind which it could escape with more money from a second sale of stock to the venture capitalists,” which only further reduced his stake in the company. (Rafferty did pocket a share of that $4 million, so it’s not like he was left with nothing.)

Of course, it turned out that Summit had purchased a proverbial lemon. Fundamentally, Schuler’s strategy was to spend big and acquire market share in what was still the emerging field of presentation graphics software. The problem was that a number of other, more established companies entered the field around the same time. This included Microsoft, which acquired PowerPoint when it purchased the program’s developer, Forethought, Inc., in July 1987.

PowerPoint beat Cricket Presents to market by nearly a year. Other presentation software programs on the market by the end of 1988 included Aldus Persuasion, Symantec’s MORE II, and Letraset’s StandOut! In a March 1989 comparison of the five programs, MacWEEK said that among the customers it surveyed, those who preferred graphics-oriented programs favored Persuasion first, followed by PowerPoint. While Cricket Presents received high marks for its “gradated backgrounds,” the Aldus and Microsoft programs “were essential and provided the finished look associated with custom slide production.” Meanwhile, MORE II was considered a superior text-based presentation package, particularly with respect to its handling of outlines.

Given the strong competition, perhaps there wasn’t much Cricket Software could do to keep up. Barry Schuler apparently saw the writing on the wall. He resigned as Cricket’s CEO in January 1989, just nine months after taking the job. Barry Borden, who was previously the CEO of New Jersey-based Franklin Computer Corporation, took over as president and chief executive.

Borden walked into what he described to MacWEEK as a “company out of control.” He cut the staff by nearly half and leased out much of the company’s Malvern office space. This led to delays in updating Cricket’s aging product lines, Cricket Graph and Cricket Draw, further eroding consumer confidence.

In May 1989, Rafferty and Muldoon both resigned from the company. Summit Group, now the company’s major shareholder, went looking for a buyer, and found one in Computer Associates, which acquired all of Cricket Software’s business and assets in June 1989.

Computer Associates would actually keep Cricket Presents alive for several more years on both the Mac and PC platforms. While Cricket Software was a Macintosh-focused developer, it had licensed the rights to create a PC version to Xerox, which released it as Xerox Presents. When Xerox decided to close its desktop software division in February 1990, however, Computer Associates exercised its option to acquire the PC rights back and subsequently re-released the presentation software as CA-Cricket Presents on both platforms.

As for the former Cricket Software principals, Darragh Muldoon at least managed to get a third husband out of the company. She married Jan Deruiter, one of Cricket’s first hires, and they went on to start a web development company in the 1990s. Jim Rafferty continues to enjoy a long career as a software engineer. After Cricket’s demise, he co-founded C-Cube Microsystems, which developed the first real-time codec for the JPEG image standard. More recently, Rafferty started Maui Software, which is developing Maui Chart, which he describes as something of a spiritual successor to original Cricket Graph.

Barry Schuler, meanwhile, followed up his brief stint at Cricket Software with an equally short stop at Jasmine Technologies, Inc., a San Francisco-based manufacturer of Macintosh disk drives, where he served as executive vice president. He left that position in January 1990 to start his own company, Medior Incorporated.

Medior quickly found success developing interactive CD-ROM software, such as Rock, Rap ‘N Roll (1993), a music-making program for the Macintosh. But it was Medior’s work helping early Internet giant America Online redesign its user interface that led Schuler to the dot-com promised land. In May 1995, AOL acquired Medior outright in a stock swap valued at $28 million.

Schuler then joined AOL’s executive team, eventually rising to become president of the company’s Interactive Services Group. Following the 2001 merger of AOL with Time Warner, the new AOL Time Warner named Schuler chairman and CEO of what was now the company’s America Online unit.

That position didn’t last long, however, as AOL’s dial-up Internet business started to dry up in the early 2000s and the parent company’s stock fell by nearly half in the year following the merger. In April 2002, AOL Time Warner “reassigned” Schuler to a new make-work position that only lasted a short time before he left the company for good.

After leaving AOL Time Warner, Schuler founded Meteor Vineyard in Napa Valley, which he still owns today. He also got into venture capital, serving as a founder and partner at DFJ Growth.

Notes from the Random Access File