Well, let’s look at the past!
I see more and more content regarding BI industry trends. This is common around December and even more around the infamous “magic quadrant” reporting season. Before I carry on, I should say that I have yet to see any correlation between the annual “magic quadrant” and what is actually happening out there in the trenches of the industry. The quadrant is also too vague: if a vendor places in any three out of four quadrants they can claim a success. Last year all the top five BI vendors celebrated their success in the Gartner Magic Quadrant – which doesn’t really make sense to me. There should be some winners and losers, not just all winners?
But that is another story, and this post is not about small yearly increments and placement in broad quadrants in an often-biased annual publication which is funded by industry insiders! Let’s take a step back and look at the much bigger BI picture. What is happening in our industry and where are we going to be in five years?
The simplest way to see the future is to take you through a brief journey through the story of Excel – which actually was the Entire BI industry for many years (between 2002 and circa 2007). Most of us take Microsoft Excel for granted, and we think that this brilliant software was all of a sudden released to huge acclaim. But there is more to the story – and the story has important lessons for us. It’s a real business wars type of drama!
Just as Xerox became the byword for office printing, the words came spreadsheet and Excel came to go together. But, believe it or not (depending on your age), there used to be an entire industry of spreadsheet tools.
The beginning
Perhaps the grandfather of all of these spreadsheet tools was a ground-breaking program called Visicalc in 1978. If you thought that seeing your first iPhone was an “ah-ha” moment, then just try to imagine your first sight of Visicalc in a world when mainframe, green and black were standard.
For me it would have been a mind-bending thought process just to comprehend – even if the first version of VisiCal was simply 5 columns and 20 rows!
According to Wikipedia and his own website, “Dan Bricklin conceived VisiCalc while watching a presentation at Harvard Business School. The professor was creating a financial model on a blackboard that was ruled with vertical and horizontal lines (resembling accounting paper) to create a table, and he wrote formulas and data into the cells. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to erase and rewrite several sequential entries in the table. Bricklin realized that he could replicate the process on a computer using an “electronic spreadsheet” to view results of underlying formulae.” (If you have a tea break and enjoy discovering where things come from it will be worth your while to visit Dan Bricklin’s website http://www.bricklin.com/history/saiidea.htm).
With the rise of the PC, other programs started to follow. SuperCalc came and achieved a fairly dominant presence. Microsoft then saw this development and released a rudimentary tool called Multiplan and dubbed it the new “Electronic Paper”. The next iteration of the spreadsheet and perhaps the biggest leap forward came with the launch of Lotus 1-2-3 in 1983. Looking at a screen of Lotus from afar and you might mistake it for early Excel. John Walkenbackh (the godfather of Excel books) states that the launch of Lotus 1-2-3 was a huge event and perhaps the first time that software was advertised in general interest media (Wall Street Journal). As you may easily comprehend these products had plenty of money backing them, since advertising in the WSJ is not a cheap affair.
Soon after this came a whole wave of wannabe spreadsheet operators and any respectable computer store would have a display to showcase the different spreadsheet products on offer. There would be packages better suited to different industries – but as niche spreadsheet packages catered to specific problem sets, Lotus 1-2-3 continued to cater to the broad corporate space.
There would be packages better suited to different industries – but as niche spreadsheet packages catered to specific problem sets, Lotus 1-2-3 continued to cater to the broad corporate space.
Microsoft was its second attempt in entering rapidly growing spreadsheet industry. Its earlier product (Multiplan) had failed after going back to the drawing board and it released a product called Excel 1.0 in 1985. But Excel was by no means a dominant feature and was not seen as a threat by Lotus.
So, with all this in mind – by 1990 we have a massive spreadsheet industry with many players. Where was Microsoft at this time? Well, they were somewhat in the spreadsheet game. Multiplan was dead and buried and the new Excel 3.0 was selling but it was underselling Lotus 1-2-3. A PC user could very well have been a user of MS Word as well as Lotus 1-2-3 at the same time.
Then the big bang in computing happened – Microsoft released Windows 3.0 and changed the way of computing forever. With the success of Windows, Microsoft was dead set on taking out Lotus and had plenty of cash to try and do it. And the way this was done was through MS Office and plenty of money. It is said that Microsoft spent more money developing Excel than the rest of the spreadsheet industry combined had spent on development. And the neat trick was that it started shipping Excel with Word together in a package called MS Office. There were other products with Office but in my view, Office was simply a way to get Excel onto the PC of every person who wanted Word and Windows.
Also amazing was the pace of change in Excel between the various versions.
By the end of the decade (1999), most companies across the world had a copy of Excel on every computer and Lotus 1-2-3 was fast becoming a distant memory of the past (although some sources say that Lotus also lost focus of 1-2-3 in favour of Lotus Notes). Five years after 1999 – many people would never have guessed that a Spreadsheet was anything other than MS Excel.
But how does all of this relate to Business Intelligence? Well for me it is pretty simple. Microsoft realised in 2010 that they did not have a proper leg in the BI game. They tried a few products first (such as Business Intelligence Development Studio and Microsoft Management Reporter). They finally got it right with MS Power BI, but just as with Excel the early versions were certainly nothing to write home about! But, Microsoft had the money and the clout to the sustain bad ideas – and weak first versions. Subsequent versions became better and better and clearly the team behind PowerBI are still iterating at a pace that outstrips the rest of the industry by far! To help drive growth with Excel, it was coupled together with MS Word, and now we see Power BI given away for free with MS Azure installations.
The parallels here are clear, Microsoft is large company and has the resources to persevere and try products and iterate them. If a product fails, they have cash to try another version. With Power BI revenue is not their primary driver now (for example, they are happy to discount, or give it away). The speed of Power BI releases is almost unparalleled in industry. Which product is going to be the most dominant in the BI Industry in five years? I think this blog post speaks for itself.
Business Intelligence Development Studio Report (2010)
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