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Here Is My Idea
Yeah, selling the idea is difficult. But, it's not impossible. Just start a blog and explain why your idea is better than Microsoft's or Google's.
I started this blog six months ago to do just what Robert Scoble is saying: to explain why my idea is so good. I don't want venture capital, but I do want to capture the imaginations of colleagues and first adopters. I have some white papers and a prototype from about 5 years ago that I only showed under non-disclosure at the time, but now I intend to explain it all in this blog eventually. That old assumption that it needed to be kept secret has long since vanished.
My idea brings together spreadsheets, XML and peer to peer technology. Stay tuned to this blog as I expand on it.
I don't know how best to sell this idea yet, so instead this far I have been practicing by putting down some foundations of my philosophy of software. But Scoble's post catapulted me into posting this. Like the ebays and the Googles, my idea is not so much something new as it is an approach that recombines existing things. Since it is not likely to catch on with a quick description, it is up to me to carry it forward for the long haul.
One starting place is to talk about problems or pains with existing solutions such as Microsoft Excel and Access. But it is not to say the existing solutions are bad. They are powerful and widely used, so I would never try to compete directly. But any widely used software has to compromise and leave many of its users less than happy.
I have always found it very annoying that Excel and QuickBooks print that pesky extra column on a separate page when my table gets a little wide. There are ways to fix it, but it takes some mucking around, and its generally after I have already wasted paper. Another issue in Excel is centering the title on the whole page when it only occupies some of the columns, and doing headers and footers without editing them in the spreadsheet. Also, the VBA programming language is separate from the cell formula syntax, so when regular users reach the limit of a formula's capability they stop there.
What I am doing is identifying my constituency. My users are spread across several applications for which none of the established tools are quite right. Ideally I can carve out my place between those giants where I can grow without being stepped on.
Bookkeeping is often done with Excel and/or Access because of the difficulty of setting up and conforming to accounting applications. The idea is that you want to keep records in a way that is natural to your day to day business, and you would prefer to worry about doing reports and taxes later, when the time comes. But bookkeeping programs almost always require a lot of setup at the beginning and it is hard to know where and how to record unusual things.
Excel is great just to put stuff in columns and rows. Access takes you a step further to get it into columns and rows that are in database tables facilitating additional data processing. Word takes you one step back and allows regular text and pictures in addition to tables with columns and rows, but then programmatic access can be difficult.
The spreadsheet component of my idea has several defining aspects:
- When starting with a blank sheet, it focuses on rapid flexible freeform and tabular data entry on a page view where the number of columns can change between rows.
- Reports are simply new sheets which may be built from other sheets, and sheets are accessed like database tables.
- A sheet is like a document that prints the way it looks. This is a unifying principle that limits embedded components to ones which print as they appear in their non-focused state.
- Sheets are easily designed and programmed for end user friendly data entry and work flow.
- The formula shorthand and scripting language are unified with debugging and auditing, and wizards generate modifiable scripts.
The desktop application can act as a node in a peer to peer network for sharing a sheet or a bundle of sheets. In contrast to Groove, this P2P arrangement de-emphasizes infrastructure, and instead supports quick ad-hoc connections more akin to instant messaging.
While my spreadsheet prototype has never been released, you can try out my animated graphical demonstration of peer to peer messaging in Windows. The firstobject XML Messaging project is a simple executable you can run right out of the zip file and type "demo" to see the animated show of a buyer seller conversation. Run it from an additional machine on your LAN and without any setup you can hook it into the conversation occuring on the first machine by typing "loc sellerXYZ,ComputerA" and "buyer SellerXYZ". Full details are there on that page.
This post is only a first peek. There is already quite a bit of depth to this technology including written materials that I will be slowly going through and putting forth in this blog, and components under development in other (free) firstobject.com projects like the messaging one.
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