Episode: 745
Title: HPR0745: Wingz
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0745/hpr0745.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-08 01:49:53

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So
This is Mr. Ketch, it's good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and I'm going to have
a little divergence from our normal discussion here and talk about lessons learned, we'll
call this, so we may have a series of lessons learned. And my lessons learned here is going
to be about a little product that was of company I worked for before, I started working
for the company I am presently employed by, and I'm going on 20 years with this company,
but I used to work before that for a company here in Kansas City called Innovative Software.
They got bought out subsequently by Informix, and that's a whole story which we may go into
later in a lesson board if I decided to do this as a series. And primary product that
innovating software had was a feat of products called Smart Software, it was a spreadsheet,
a word processor, and a database. And we may talk about that also at some point, but I
specifically want to talk about a such a good product that was originally for the Macintosh
called Wings. Now Wings was an interesting product because someone who is studying marketing
can fill me in on this. You should probably call in, or it's a bit, you know, an
Acro-Public Radio episode in this regard, but a certain portion of marketing is finding
that niche in the market that needs to be filled. Going out there surveying the products
that are available in the market, finding a place where you think there is a need and fulfilling
that need. That is decidedly not the history of Wings, that's a product. Turn the way back,
machine all the way back to 1984, and the Macintosh comes out. I remember seeing the predecessor
of the Macintosh Lease computer down in the Springfield of all places at a little computer store
that used to be across the battlefield mall. My aunt, on my maternal aunt, lived in Springfield
and we would go there, thanksgiving and Christus Pines and things like that, visiting my grandmother
and my aunt, Don, south with me. My cousin knew I was interested in that, and I found out about
the computer store, and so one way or another we got over there and I saw Lease. I just really
didn't get it initially. Plus it was really, really, extraordinarily priced, even in the old,
not quite inflated dollars back then. But the Macintosh comes out and a year later,
at Condex, one of the guys who did the, happened to be the spreadsheet programmer,
was the guy named Joe, and I'll call him Joe because that's his name. I'm not going to change
any names here to protect the innocent or the guilty, and Joe went to Condex. Condex was the
big show back then. This is all pre-world wide web, right? So the way you got the word out was you
bought advertisements and printed media, and you showed your new product at Condex, and all the
computer dealers found out about it, and then they picked it up and sold it in their stores.
Condex is a big deal. I have a high school friend who actually went to every Condex, I guess,
up until the time that they quit doing Condexes. Dan went on to become an electronics engineer,
electrical engineer, electronics, and all that kind of stuff, which I probably would have if I
hadn't taken a slightly different path due to randomness of how I was scheduled and the group
that I was in when I went to my orientation at the university, but that's another story.
And Dan went to Condex every year. I went to one Condex back in the day. They're in Las Vegas,
and that used to be the big show in Las Vegas. This was way back before all of the expansion of
Las Vegas in recent years. And so at Condex, I guess they showed a preview of the back-and-touch
plus. Now, it wasn't really coming out efficiently until Macworld the next year, you know, in January,
but there was a preview that happened at Condex, and Joe came back all excited about developing
software for the Mac Plus. He really got it. He thought it was great. It was going to be a great
platform. It really compared to the 128 came back, which was a little more limited. The Plus really
did have, you know, it was at the time the big thing was the 3M, okay? This was a thing that the
3M kind of concepts of something that actually came up with, I believe Carnegie Mellon. And they
started pushing this as the kind of standard machine they wanted to have for their students, okay?
Now, the 3M was, excuse me, an idea of the limitations of design, the 3M was 3 million
pitfalls resolution, sorry, 1 million resolution pitfalls for your black and white
display, 1 million bytes of memory, right? A mega memory. And what was that there? Oh, a mega
hurt of processor speed. The 3M machine. And the plus, you know, embodied that whole thing. And
Joe was really excited about this. And he came back and talked to Mark, Mark being his best friend,
who also happened to be one of the co-founders of the company and the Ed of R&D. And Joe wanted
to develop for the Mac Plus. So we developed a spreadsheet for the Macintosh because that was what
Joe coded. He wrote the spreadsheet. Now, at this particular time, a spreadsheet from Macintosh
was the stupidest possible product from a marketing perspective to come out with because
Excel for the MacTosh was available. And it was a 49.9, you know, a 44 100% of the market.
I mean, it was a spreadsheet Excel. They were synonymous. You want a spreadsheet of the MacTosh?
You buy Excel. I mean, there may have been a couple of other spreadsheets available,
but they were nothing in the market compared to Excel. Stupidest possible product to come up with.
But that's what Joe wrote. So that's what we did. He checked the code base for our existing
spreadsheet that ran under, you know, not even Windows, but DOS. That was part of the smart software
system. And started recompiling that onto the Macintosh. This involved, of course,
Inside Macintosh, which was a collection of books. This was called PreOS 10, right?
Back in the day, you had to use Inside Macintosh to do everything on the Macintosh. Then the joke
was to understand any given chapter of Inside Macintosh. You had to understand every other chapter first.
Think about it. I still have a collection, I think, of the old Inside Macintosh. It's like
five volumes initially and expanded through the years. I forget how many. Because anybody's
interested in that, you know, from nostalgic reasons. I think I had that still somewhere.
So the Macintosh product, we were going to come up with the eventual name for this was Wing.
And we had another guy named Larry, who was a programmer. He was actually trained as a mechanical
engineer, but like many engineering students, got involved with computers in school and really
liked that. So he was making his living as a programmer. And somewhere along the line, Larry
came along board at the innovative and he was a graphic genius. He was the one who could take
these spreadsheet numbers and make them look beautiful, make them presentation-wise,
graphically represent those numbers. And so Joe and Larry basically were working on this product.
Now, along the lines of the development of this product, it was really just Joe and Larry
and two other people that got added to the team. And so there was four people, really,
that developed this product. And about a year, so this is all, you know, 85 or so, right,
when the plus came out, a year later at either Condex, or I think that's probably Mac World,
a year later. So now it's 86. Another guy who with our marketing genius, who really had a
pinched for having brilliant ideas, were presenting in, you know, two-page ads and magazines,
which is how you got word out about your product and got interest, right, for your World Black Web.
Doug had come up with a series of really brilliant kinds of things. So Doug came up with this idea.
We were going to have the Wing Pine capsule, the Wing Pine machine. We were going to show you the
future of spreadsheets on the Macintosh. And it was really a brilliant idea because, I mean,
we had this building. I mean, we had this small thing. It was like an amusement park thing. You came
in the entrance and you went out the exit and inside you saw this video. He hired Leonard Beemoy
to be the person who was going to show you the future of spreadsheets with wings, right? He
hired Leonard Beemoy to be the on in the video, not just voiceover. I mean, he appeared in the video.
I mean, Doug wanted to meet Leonard Beemoy and he got to in the studio, but still, I mean,
it was brilliant. And there were people, I mean, we had booth girls, right, that were in these
silver jumpsuits, you know, from the future. And they would let you in, like with an amusement park,
kind of a thing, you know. And, and then you go in and there was, there was smoke literally,
no mirrors, but literally like smoke and stuff. And, and, and then Leonard Beemoy showed you
the video of the future. And then as you left, there were more booth girls in, in silver jumpsuits
that would hand you out a wings bag. It was a little shoulder bag, like a messenger bag, right?
That had wings logo on the side and all that. There was a whole collection of wings bags because
eventually it was a successful product and it came out in various flavors, right? It came out
not only for the Macintosh, but for Windows, for OS 2, and each one of these had a different color.
And there are different color schemes, you know, different combinations. I think I have a complete
collection of all the wings bags, of all the different color combinations, all the operating
systems and everything. Eventually, chaos and manner, which was a column written by Jerry Pernell.
A science fiction writer of much renown, and you should read some nivenin Pernell and some
Pernell books if you're interested in a hard science fiction during some of the heydays back there
in the 70s and 80s. But, Jerry wrote the chaos and manner column in byte magazine, which was the
premiere magazine, cross platform magazine of the day. And he actually awarded the wings bag as the
laptop accessory of the year one year. He didn't know anything about the product, but it was the best
possible thing to carry your laptop around it. What's the wings bag? I mean, we gave out hundreds
of these things at every show. And we did that. We had the time capsule machine at every single
computer show for a year, a solid year of total vaporware, but getting people excited about it,
right? And then finally, after two years of development, the wings product came out. And it was
a success. I mean, we managed to 99 or 44 100 percent. I mean, exo was it, right? It was a
stupid product to come out with, but we got upwards of 15 percent or more of the marketplace
in the Macintosh for the wings product. And it was a fantastic product. I mean, the number
crunching was great. Larious graphics were superlative. Eventually, a couple of other people I
knew, a lady who I worked for, who was in development, and her husband at the time, who was kind of
the, you know, implementation guy, you know, who worked on implementing a customer's sites and
using our software customer sites. Over a weekend, they wrote a data transfer kind of a thing
where you could take data from databases, various databases at the, you know, available at the
time, and pull them into wings, and then graph it in number crunch and all this kind of stuff.
And it was great. That is actually what caused the the whole Informix deal to come into play. If
that got the, you know, Informix databases, we're one of the ones that this data transfer
just data product connected to of the various databases available at the time. And this data
link product was what got their attention and caused the whole, you know, thing of the merger,
quote unquote, which we'll talk about later because it wasn't really a merger with Informix
and when that all took place. So what are the lessons learned here? Sometimes what the people
in marketing will tell you, oh, don't come out with this because there's no chance, you got to
ignore that because passion, passion and taking that passion and you have to deliver with a product,
right? That is what makes a insanely great product, which was a term that Steve Jobs used
back in the day and is also a term that Guy Kawasaki, a software evangelist for Apple. Think
about that. They have software evangelists back in the day and a insanely great product comes
from passion and turning that passion into delivery of a great product, okay? And the second lesson
learned is a truly insanely great product. I believe this to the core of my being and it's true
to this day, a team of six people is optimal for a insanely great product. Maybe upwards of 10,
if you're really good at managing things, you can keep focused with a dozen people on the project.
But more than that, then you lose that focus that leads to an insanely great product.
And I think that that is true to this day and I think that somewhat that is reflected in
open source because if you look at the open source projects, there's a core of people that are
really where everything is happening and then they can coordinate with other people and have them
help them. But there's always a core for the really great products that's a small core and that's
what results. So that was my lessons learned. Sometimes the marketing guys are wrong when they say,
oh, there's no chance of making it with this. And insanely great products come from small groups of
people. You got to find the right group of six people, right? So that was my lessons learned number one
and we may have more of these and that's all for today. We'll talk to you later. Bye now.
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