Sorcim
Encyclopedia
Sorcim was an early start-up company in Silicon Valley, founded in June 1980 by Richard Frank, Paul McQuesten, Martin Herbach, Anil Lakhwara , and Steve Jasik - all former Control Data Corporation
employees working in the Language Group in Sunnyvale, CA. Jasik left company early on, to develop the MacNosy product for the Macintosh.
Sorcim was best known for SuperCalc
, a spreadsheet the company developed for the Osborne Computer Corporation
portable computer. The company made many other products, including SuperWriter and SuperProject before its acquisition by Computer Associates in 1985. Although the company continued as a largely autonomous division of CA, it never again achieved prominence after the acquisition.
The company was named "Sorcim" after the Frank Richard saw a reflection of the word “micros” in an airplane window.
operating system using the Intel 8080, 8085 and later the 8086, Zilog
Z80 and the Z8000. The company’s early products included Pascal/M, and ACT - a set of cross assemblers including one for the Atari
(6502) and the Commodore Pet
.
In these early days of the company, and before the introduction of the IBM PC and MS-DOS, Sorcim used Godbout S100
bus CP/M machines for development; these machines were fast and the people at Godbout were competent hardware developers. Bill Godbout
was one of the first commercial accounts for Sorcim, supporting the company’s cross assemblers and Pascal/M. In fact at one time Godbout helped relieve a short-term cash flow problem by doing a one-time buy of development tool products. "Bill was one of those people who always provided you an honest opinion (sometimes to the dismay of Sorcim managers) and great Friday lunch meetings."
. Lee Felsenstein
was developing the industry’s first portable computer for Adam’s new company, and he needed a CP/M BIOS. This computer was released as the Osborne I.
In late Fall of 1980, Adam was looking for a spreadsheet for the Osborne I. His efforts to acquire rights to VisiCalc
were disappointing, so he asked Sorcim if they would be interested in developing a spreadsheet that would be competitive with VisiCalc, and develop it in time to showcase it at the West Coast Computer Faire
in April 1981. The company accepted the challenge, working days on contract programming (a CHILL
compiler for Siemens
) and nights on the Osborne BIOS and SuperCalc. With Martin Herbach as the lead architect, the company hired Gary Ballenson, as a contractor to implement a demo version of the application. Someone selected the name SuperCalc.
The product was introduced in April 1981 at the West Coast Computer Faire in the Osborne booth. The enthusiastic reception surprised the Sorcim folks. SuperCalc was written in assembly code using Sorcim's ACT assembler. Eventually SuperCalc was ported to over 150 different hardware platforms - from the Osborne I to the Zenith Z89
. By the 18-month mark, the company had sold over 250,000 copies of the original SuperCalc. During this period, the company estimated that VisiCalc’s market share was about 85% and SuperCalc was about 15%. There were some other early spreadsheet programs, but these two programs shared essentially the entire market.
At this time, the company made its first serious effort to establish control over the products, and Greg Resnick (who came aboard with the SpellGuard acquisition) became Product Manager of SuperWriter, while new hire Walter Feigenson came in to manage SuperCalc.
The founders were still actively looking for a new leader during the early part of 1983, since they were out of their elements and getting more frustrated as time moved on. They had interviewed a number of candidates for CEO, but none was acceptable. Finally they coalesced around Jim Pelkey, who had started consulting for the founders in late 1982. Pelkey was introduced to the company by Jack Melchor of Melchor Venture Management to help management create a strategic plan. Melchor was an early investor in ROLM, Software Publishing, 3Com, The Learning Company, and he was the only outside investor in Sorcim (and a member of the Board).
Jim was appointed President in May 1983, followed by George Wikle, CFO. Bill Ferguson, was hired from MicroPro (the makers of WordStar) as VP of Sales, and Steve Goldsworthy joined from HP as VP Engineering. Ron Grubman was recruited as VP Corporate Development in the Summer of 1983, and the team was rounded out by Hal King, who was hired as VP Marketing.
With the new management team coming together, the team focused on aggressively growing the company to maintain market visibility and power, respond to the phenomenon of Lotus 1-2-3, create a "killer app" for the IBM PC, solve the constraints of a thin capitalization and remain profitable.
The marketing challenge was to create a solid relationship with IBM while generating as much revenue as possible from existing products. Simultaneously, the staff was tasked with evolving beyond a CP/M company. Work began on a new "killer" product that was to become SuperCalc3.
Although well-known because SuperCalc was one of the three products packaged with the wildly successful Osborne I CP/M "luggable" computer. Sorcim had no new and innovative product offerings for the breakthrough PC success, the IBM PC. SuperCalc for MS-DOS was functionally the same product as the CP/M version, which was typical for all established products at this time. Lotus 1-2-3
was the most notable exception. Failure to change focus from CP/M, where the company had almost 100% market share, to PC-DOS, where SuperCalc simply maintained its market share, was a big mistake.
The capital structure constraints required the company to become profitable, again attain market growth and to create an exciting business plan for the future; all aimed at raising a new capital round in the early part of 1984.
It seemed important to demonstrate that the new team was in control, since so many startups falter when the founders don’t hand over full control to their new management teams. So while the new team came together, Richard Frank and Paul McQuesten moved a few blocks away to an office called "The Farm." Nobody knew the location or their phone number. There were two purposes: 1) to give the new team some breathing room, and 2) to start work on a new version of a multifunction product that was code-named Oyster. Richard, Paul, and Jeff McKenna bought a Symbolics
LISP
machine so they could start rapid prototyping of new products. This work had previously been done on paper and at white boards.
In fact, there was another project going on to define this product—a kind of skunkworks team composed of Martin Herbach, Dave Montagna (also of CDC Fortran compiler fame), and Walter Feigenson. This team got pretty far into defining what would have been a windowing system based on technology they had acquired from Payman Pouladdej and Peter Fiore—a system that appeared very similar to Gem
, which was being developed by Digital Research
(much to the chagrin of Payman and Peter who had shown it to Digital Research before joining Sorcim). This project died when Computer Associates acquired Sorcim.
By the time SuperCalc2 shipped in April 1983, Sorcim knew that its competitor was no longer VisiCalc, but Lotus 1-2-3, which became an instant best seller in February 1983. Besides being technically excellent, 1-2-3 also had a substantially larger marketing budget than Sorcim’s. As a marketing reply to this juggernaut, Sorcim crafted plans to add the features of SuperChart to the DOS version of SuperCalc, and this became SuperCalc3, which shipped in September 1983. SC3 was introduced at the CP/M show in Boston in 1983. Although some thought this venue an odd choice, Sorcim still thought at that time that it could make a "universal" version of SuperCalc3 for any CP/M machine. This turned out to be impractical because CP/M-86 did not function to hide the hardware level from the application software.
At the Boston show, many industry people paid attention to Sorcim's booth, including Mitch Kapor
, the founder of Lotus Development, the 1-2-3 company. SuperCalc was effectively the only competition to 1-2-3 at that point, and SC3 was vastly superior to 1-2-3 in its graphics. When Product Manager Walter Feigenson showed Kapor the product for the first time, Mitch was astounded that SC3 could do everything it did from a single disk. He even remarked that he had to reprogram 1-2-3 in Assembler to get its speed - and he wanted to know how Martin Herbach had managed to get the C-coded graphics engine to work in the middle of a non-relocatable Assembler program.(That remains a bit of unknown magic to this day.) By all accounts, Martin had achieved the impossible. SuperCalc’s graphics were on a par with dedicated graphics programs (it won 3rd place in the National Software Testing Labs graphics programs competition in 1984). But good graphics weren’t enough to supplant 1-2-3, and in fact the company learned that 1-2-3 users weren’t even printing their graphics, since the cable for the only low-cost pen plotter was wired incorrectly.
It's interesting to note that Microsoft also had a spreadsheet (MultiPlan
) at this time, but the main competitors for the King of Spreadsheets remained SuperCalc3 and later versions, and 1-2-3 in its upgraded versions. Microsoft eventually abandoned MultiPlan in favor of Excel
.
Management concluded that the company needed additional financial resources. Retail sales remained relatively steady, and the company sold some ports to other platforms that generated significant OEM revenue (some ports ran as high as $500,000). But at retail, the company was never able to make a significant dent in the 1-2-3 juggernaut.
Sorcim did find a "sweet spot" in the US Government and some large companies that refused to buy software with copy protection, which was included in every copy of 1-2-3. Eventually, Lotus lost big chunks of their government business to Sorcim, and Sorcim started selling unlimited site licenses for SuperCalc and SuperWriter to firms like Ernst & Young (one of the "Big 8" accounting firms).
; and Paul McQuesten's SuperCalc3 for the Apple IIc
(in native 6502 code.
Revenues from compilers and products like the company's Pascal/M interpreter were drying up fast. SuperWriter, when it shipped, never sold in substantial quantities, and was limited by its ability to edit only what it could hold in memory. The company probably diluted its efforts in agreeing to ports of SuperCalc3 to Unix machines (AT&T machines - the Unix PC, and the 3B2, which Sorcim employees referred to as the world's most expensive paperweight). Non-standard defocused efforts in the predominant market, especially on contracts they had for computers for which the company could not complete an effective port. In those days, the "gold standard" for compatibility was Compaq; everything else had differences, sometimes trivial (AT&T had additional graphics capabilities), or massive - but every company wanted to claim IBM compatibility, and that could only be proven through software. By this time, Osborne, which never established a foothold in the PC-DOS market, was no longer a factor in portable computers. But there were others in the works, and Sorcim worked with many of these startups.
So, the burden of revenue for the company was always SuperCalc, no matter how the company tried to branch out. Starting with SuperCalc2, the product life cycle was tightened to 9 months! The objective was to catch up to and pass 1-2-3. By the time SuperCalc4 shipped, in 1985, the software was so refined that it was runner-up for the product of the year at PC Magazine's annual Comdex
bash. PC Magazine, in its “Best of 1986” review had this to say: “If market dominance were based on rational criteria, Computer Associates' SuperCalc 4 would certainly replace 1-2-3 as the leading spreadsheet program. After all, it can do anything that 1-2-3 can do and adds some notable features of its own." Note that this is a good example of the old maxim that to have the best product does not guarantee success in the market.
In the Fall of 1983 (first closing January 1984), Sorcim raised over $9 million in private financing through Alex. Brown & Sons
, but soon after concluded that Microsoft and Lotus had such dominant market shares that even more resources were required to be competitive. The company also funded a million dollar print advertising campaign in the Wall Street Journal and other national papers that failed to increase sales. In the early part of 1984, it became clear that the revenue bubble that Sorcim and substantially all of the other companies in the PC marketplace had experienced was bursting. Consequently, management re-hired Alex. Brown and Sons to find a corporate partner. In the spring of 1984, Computer Associates purchased Sorcim.
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation was a supercomputer firm. For most of the 1960s, it built the fastest computers in the world by far, only losing that crown in the 1970s after Seymour Cray left the company to found Cray Research, Inc....
employees working in the Language Group in Sunnyvale, CA. Jasik left company early on, to develop the MacNosy product for the Macintosh.
Sorcim was best known for SuperCalc
SuperCalc
SuperCalc was a spreadsheet application published by Sorcim in 1980, and originally bundled as part of the CP/M software package included with the Osborne 1 portable computer....
, a spreadsheet the company developed for the Osborne Computer Corporation
Osborne Computer Corporation
The Osborne Computer Corporation was a pioneering maker of portable computers.-The Osborne 1:After Adam Osborne sold his computer book-publishing company to McGraw-Hill in 1979, he decided to sell an inexpensive portable computer with bundled software and hired Lee Felsenstein to design it...
portable computer. The company made many other products, including SuperWriter and SuperProject before its acquisition by Computer Associates in 1985. Although the company continued as a largely autonomous division of CA, it never again achieved prominence after the acquisition.
The company was named "Sorcim" after the Frank Richard saw a reflection of the word “micros” in an airplane window.
Early history
The company was founded to expand the microcomputer products from Digicom, a company formed by Richard in 1978. Paul joined in 1979. The Digicom software programs ran on the CP/MCP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...
operating system using the Intel 8080, 8085 and later the 8086, Zilog
Zilog
Zilog, Inc., previously known as ZiLOG , is a manufacturer of 8-bit and 24-bit microcontrollers, and is most famous for its Intel 8080-compatible Z80 series.-History:...
Z80 and the Z8000. The company’s early products included Pascal/M, and ACT - a set of cross assemblers including one for the Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
(6502) and the Commodore Pet
Commodore PET
The Commodore PET was a home/personal computer produced from 1977 by Commodore International...
.
In these early days of the company, and before the introduction of the IBM PC and MS-DOS, Sorcim used Godbout S100
S-100 bus
The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983 , was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800, generally considered today to be the first personal computer...
bus CP/M machines for development; these machines were fast and the people at Godbout were competent hardware developers. Bill Godbout
Bill Godbout
Bill Godbout was an early computer pioneer and entrepreneur known for manufacturing and selling computer equipment, parts and Electronic kits in Silicon Valley, before the time of the Apple II....
was one of the first commercial accounts for Sorcim, supporting the company’s cross assemblers and Pascal/M. In fact at one time Godbout helped relieve a short-term cash flow problem by doing a one-time buy of development tool products. "Bill was one of those people who always provided you an honest opinion (sometimes to the dismay of Sorcim managers) and great Friday lunch meetings."
The Birth of SuperCalc
In 1980 at one of the local monthly computer industry poker parties, Bill Godbout introduced Richard Frank to Adam OsborneAdam Osborne
Adam Osborne was an American author, book and software publisher, and computer designer who founded several companies in the United States and elsewhere.- Computers :...
. Lee Felsenstein
Lee Felsenstein
Lee Felsenstein is an American computer engineer who played a central role in the development of the personal computer...
was developing the industry’s first portable computer for Adam’s new company, and he needed a CP/M BIOS. This computer was released as the Osborne I.
In late Fall of 1980, Adam was looking for a spreadsheet for the Osborne I. His efforts to acquire rights to VisiCalc
VisiCalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program available for personal computers. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool...
were disappointing, so he asked Sorcim if they would be interested in developing a spreadsheet that would be competitive with VisiCalc, and develop it in time to showcase it at the West Coast Computer Faire
West Coast Computer Faire
The West Coast Computer Faire was an annual computer industry conference and exposition most often associated with San Francisco, its first and most frequent venue. The first fair was held in 1977 and was organized by Jim Warren and Bob Reiling. At the time it was the biggest computer show in the...
in April 1981. The company accepted the challenge, working days on contract programming (a CHILL
CHILL
In computing, CHILL is a procedural programming language designed for use in telecommunication switches . The language is still used for legacy systems in some telecommunication companies and for signal box programming.The CHILL language is similar in size and complexity to the Ada language...
compiler for Siemens
Siemens
Siemens may refer toSiemens, a German family name carried by generations of telecommunications industrialists, including:* Werner von Siemens , inventor, founder of Siemens AG...
) and nights on the Osborne BIOS and SuperCalc. With Martin Herbach as the lead architect, the company hired Gary Ballenson, as a contractor to implement a demo version of the application. Someone selected the name SuperCalc.
The product was introduced in April 1981 at the West Coast Computer Faire in the Osborne booth. The enthusiastic reception surprised the Sorcim folks. SuperCalc was written in assembly code using Sorcim's ACT assembler. Eventually SuperCalc was ported to over 150 different hardware platforms - from the Osborne I to the Zenith Z89
Zenith Z89
The Z-89 was a personal computer produced by Zenith Data Systems in the early 1980s. It was based on the Zilog Z80 microprocessor and ran the HDOS and CP/M operating systems...
. By the 18-month mark, the company had sold over 250,000 copies of the original SuperCalc. During this period, the company estimated that VisiCalc’s market share was about 85% and SuperCalc was about 15%. There were some other early spreadsheet programs, but these two programs shared essentially the entire market.
Growing Pains
Toward the end of 1982, the founders had become dissatisfied with company management. They removed the company president and each founder took on an acting VP role: Martin Herbach ran Sales, Anil Lakahara was responsible for software development, Paul McQuesten supervised Finance, and Richard - despite having a business card that read "Programmer" - was CEO, and Chairman. But the founders were unhappy in these roles (for most of them, not their core competencies), and they were actively looking for a new president to guide the company's growth. SuperCalc2, SuperWriter, and SuperChart, which were all announced in November 1982, had no concrete ship dates, and a census of projects in the company showed that the development staff of about 20 people was working on over 100 projects. This was whittled down to the main applications and development tools.At this time, the company made its first serious effort to establish control over the products, and Greg Resnick (who came aboard with the SpellGuard acquisition) became Product Manager of SuperWriter, while new hire Walter Feigenson came in to manage SuperCalc.
The founders were still actively looking for a new leader during the early part of 1983, since they were out of their elements and getting more frustrated as time moved on. They had interviewed a number of candidates for CEO, but none was acceptable. Finally they coalesced around Jim Pelkey, who had started consulting for the founders in late 1982. Pelkey was introduced to the company by Jack Melchor of Melchor Venture Management to help management create a strategic plan. Melchor was an early investor in ROLM, Software Publishing, 3Com, The Learning Company, and he was the only outside investor in Sorcim (and a member of the Board).
Jim was appointed President in May 1983, followed by George Wikle, CFO. Bill Ferguson, was hired from MicroPro (the makers of WordStar) as VP of Sales, and Steve Goldsworthy joined from HP as VP Engineering. Ron Grubman was recruited as VP Corporate Development in the Summer of 1983, and the team was rounded out by Hal King, who was hired as VP Marketing.
The Company Makes Plans to Move Beyond CP/M
SuperCalc2 shipped April 15, 1983 for CP/M machines, and a month later for CP/M-86 machines. Sales continued at a healthy upward pace, despite strong competition from Lotus 1-2-3. VisiCalc sales essentially dried up, and Sorcim management believed that SuperCalc maintained its 15% market share in a rapidly growing market.With the new management team coming together, the team focused on aggressively growing the company to maintain market visibility and power, respond to the phenomenon of Lotus 1-2-3, create a "killer app" for the IBM PC, solve the constraints of a thin capitalization and remain profitable.
The marketing challenge was to create a solid relationship with IBM while generating as much revenue as possible from existing products. Simultaneously, the staff was tasked with evolving beyond a CP/M company. Work began on a new "killer" product that was to become SuperCalc3.
Although well-known because SuperCalc was one of the three products packaged with the wildly successful Osborne I CP/M "luggable" computer. Sorcim had no new and innovative product offerings for the breakthrough PC success, the IBM PC. SuperCalc for MS-DOS was functionally the same product as the CP/M version, which was typical for all established products at this time. Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3
Lotus 1-2-3 is a spreadsheet program from Lotus Software . It was the IBM PC's first "killer application"; its huge popularity in the mid-1980s contributed significantly to the success of the IBM PC in the corporate environment.-Beginnings:...
was the most notable exception. Failure to change focus from CP/M, where the company had almost 100% market share, to PC-DOS, where SuperCalc simply maintained its market share, was a big mistake.
New Management Establishes Future Directions
The engineering organization was divided into three major efforts:- Maintain the current products including ports to new OEM computers,
- Create SuperCalc3, and
- Invest in a skunkworksSkunkworks projectA skunkworks project is one typically developed by a small and loosely structured group of people who research and develop a project primarily for the sake of radical innovation. The term typically refers to technology projects, and originated with Skunk Works, an official alias for the Lockheed...
effort that would lead to products beyond SuperCalc3.
The capital structure constraints required the company to become profitable, again attain market growth and to create an exciting business plan for the future; all aimed at raising a new capital round in the early part of 1984.
It seemed important to demonstrate that the new team was in control, since so many startups falter when the founders don’t hand over full control to their new management teams. So while the new team came together, Richard Frank and Paul McQuesten moved a few blocks away to an office called "The Farm." Nobody knew the location or their phone number. There were two purposes: 1) to give the new team some breathing room, and 2) to start work on a new version of a multifunction product that was code-named Oyster. Richard, Paul, and Jeff McKenna bought a Symbolics
Symbolics
Symbolics refers to two companies: now-defunct computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.The symbolics.com domain was...
LISP
Lisp
A lisp is a speech impediment, historically also known as sigmatism. Stereotypically, people with a lisp are unable to pronounce sibilants , and replace them with interdentals , though there are actually several kinds of lisp...
machine so they could start rapid prototyping of new products. This work had previously been done on paper and at white boards.
In fact, there was another project going on to define this product—a kind of skunkworks team composed of Martin Herbach, Dave Montagna (also of CDC Fortran compiler fame), and Walter Feigenson. This team got pretty far into defining what would have been a windowing system based on technology they had acquired from Payman Pouladdej and Peter Fiore—a system that appeared very similar to Gem
Graphical Environment Manager
GEM was a windowing system created by Digital Research, Inc. for use with the CP/M operating system on the Intel 8088 and Motorola 68000 microprocessors...
, which was being developed by Digital Research
Digital Research
Digital Research, Inc. was the company created by Dr. Gary Kildall to market and develop his CP/M operating system and related products. It was the first large software company in the microcomputer world...
(much to the chagrin of Payman and Peter who had shown it to Digital Research before joining Sorcim). This project died when Computer Associates acquired Sorcim.
By the time SuperCalc2 shipped in April 1983, Sorcim knew that its competitor was no longer VisiCalc, but Lotus 1-2-3, which became an instant best seller in February 1983. Besides being technically excellent, 1-2-3 also had a substantially larger marketing budget than Sorcim’s. As a marketing reply to this juggernaut, Sorcim crafted plans to add the features of SuperChart to the DOS version of SuperCalc, and this became SuperCalc3, which shipped in September 1983. SC3 was introduced at the CP/M show in Boston in 1983. Although some thought this venue an odd choice, Sorcim still thought at that time that it could make a "universal" version of SuperCalc3 for any CP/M machine. This turned out to be impractical because CP/M-86 did not function to hide the hardware level from the application software.
At the Boston show, many industry people paid attention to Sorcim's booth, including Mitch Kapor
Mitch Kapor
Mitchell David Kapor is the founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3. He is also a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and was the first chair of the Mozilla Foundation...
, the founder of Lotus Development, the 1-2-3 company. SuperCalc was effectively the only competition to 1-2-3 at that point, and SC3 was vastly superior to 1-2-3 in its graphics. When Product Manager Walter Feigenson showed Kapor the product for the first time, Mitch was astounded that SC3 could do everything it did from a single disk. He even remarked that he had to reprogram 1-2-3 in Assembler to get its speed - and he wanted to know how Martin Herbach had managed to get the C-coded graphics engine to work in the middle of a non-relocatable Assembler program.(That remains a bit of unknown magic to this day.) By all accounts, Martin had achieved the impossible. SuperCalc’s graphics were on a par with dedicated graphics programs (it won 3rd place in the National Software Testing Labs graphics programs competition in 1984). But good graphics weren’t enough to supplant 1-2-3, and in fact the company learned that 1-2-3 users weren’t even printing their graphics, since the cable for the only low-cost pen plotter was wired incorrectly.
It's interesting to note that Microsoft also had a spreadsheet (MultiPlan
MultiPlan
Multiplan was an early spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft. Known initially by the code name "EP" , it was introduced in 1982 as a competitor for VisiCalc....
) at this time, but the main competitors for the King of Spreadsheets remained SuperCalc3 and later versions, and 1-2-3 in its upgraded versions. Microsoft eventually abandoned MultiPlan in favor of Excel
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is a proprietary commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications...
.
SuperCalc3 Porting Sales
Sorcim was very successful at selling an OEM CP/M version of SuperCalc2, and sales for 1983 zoomed to $7M including the upfront OEM payments. These were not "porting contracts," since CP/M machines all executed the same code and used one of the 100+ standard terminals Sorcim products supported. The only difference in versions was the disk size and recording format. After SC3 shipped, the company began a successful campaign to port this graphical version to IBM "compatibles" (which mostly weren't 100% compatible at that time). At the same time, the company created a corporate sales organization. By early 1984, DOS sales dominated, and CP/M sales had eroded, and our efforts to get IBM to minimally endorse us - as they had endorsed Microsoft and Lotus – failed. Sales to businesses were not advancing fast enough to fund our efforts.Management concluded that the company needed additional financial resources. Retail sales remained relatively steady, and the company sold some ports to other platforms that generated significant OEM revenue (some ports ran as high as $500,000). But at retail, the company was never able to make a significant dent in the 1-2-3 juggernaut.
Sorcim did find a "sweet spot" in the US Government and some large companies that refused to buy software with copy protection, which was included in every copy of 1-2-3. Eventually, Lotus lost big chunks of their government business to Sorcim, and Sorcim started selling unlimited site licenses for SuperCalc and SuperWriter to firms like Ernst & Young (one of the "Big 8" accounting firms).
Additional Financing
Throughout this time, the company continued to increase headcount to get to the "critical mass" required to be a major player in the industry. Newly acquired products, as well as home-built efforts, failed to achieve much sales success. These included SuperProject, a project management program using "drop down menus," which was licensed from its creator Alan CooperAlan Cooper
Alan Cooper is known for his role in humanizing technology through his groundbreaking work in software design. Widely recognized as the “Father of Visual Basic," Cooper is the author of the books, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why...
; and Paul McQuesten's SuperCalc3 for the Apple IIc
Apple IIc
The Apple IIc, the fourth model in the Apple II series of personal computers, was Apple Computer’s first endeavor to produce a portable computer. The end result was a notebook-sized version of the Apple II that could be transported from place to place...
(in native 6502 code.
Revenues from compilers and products like the company's Pascal/M interpreter were drying up fast. SuperWriter, when it shipped, never sold in substantial quantities, and was limited by its ability to edit only what it could hold in memory. The company probably diluted its efforts in agreeing to ports of SuperCalc3 to Unix machines (AT&T machines - the Unix PC, and the 3B2, which Sorcim employees referred to as the world's most expensive paperweight). Non-standard defocused efforts in the predominant market, especially on contracts they had for computers for which the company could not complete an effective port. In those days, the "gold standard" for compatibility was Compaq; everything else had differences, sometimes trivial (AT&T had additional graphics capabilities), or massive - but every company wanted to claim IBM compatibility, and that could only be proven through software. By this time, Osborne, which never established a foothold in the PC-DOS market, was no longer a factor in portable computers. But there were others in the works, and Sorcim worked with many of these startups.
So, the burden of revenue for the company was always SuperCalc, no matter how the company tried to branch out. Starting with SuperCalc2, the product life cycle was tightened to 9 months! The objective was to catch up to and pass 1-2-3. By the time SuperCalc4 shipped, in 1985, the software was so refined that it was runner-up for the product of the year at PC Magazine's annual Comdex
COMDEX
COMDEX was a computer expo held in Las Vegas, Nevada, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, usually second only to the German CeBIT, and by many accounts one of the largest trade shows in any industry sector...
bash. PC Magazine, in its “Best of 1986” review had this to say: “If market dominance were based on rational criteria, Computer Associates' SuperCalc 4 would certainly replace 1-2-3 as the leading spreadsheet program. After all, it can do anything that 1-2-3 can do and adds some notable features of its own." Note that this is a good example of the old maxim that to have the best product does not guarantee success in the market.
In the Fall of 1983 (first closing January 1984), Sorcim raised over $9 million in private financing through Alex. Brown & Sons
Alex. Brown & Sons
Alex. Brown & Sons was the first investment bank in the United States, founded by Alexander Brown in 1800 and based in Baltimore, Maryland. The firm was acquired by Bankers Trust in 1997 to form BT Alex...
, but soon after concluded that Microsoft and Lotus had such dominant market shares that even more resources were required to be competitive. The company also funded a million dollar print advertising campaign in the Wall Street Journal and other national papers that failed to increase sales. In the early part of 1984, it became clear that the revenue bubble that Sorcim and substantially all of the other companies in the PC marketplace had experienced was bursting. Consequently, management re-hired Alex. Brown and Sons to find a corporate partner. In the spring of 1984, Computer Associates purchased Sorcim.