Release 1.0 1.0

CHRONICLE: DO YOU KNOW WHAT I KNOW? Now that spreadsheets are a fairly mature market and most of the fighting is for market share, Lotus is about to announce a technology that could radically improve its position in the cutthroat spreadsheet market. No, it’s not a Windows version of Improv, which lets an individual do awesome things with the data on his own, but rather a new technology/feature for 1-2-3 called Chronicle, which lets an individual share not just his data but his assumptions with others. Chronicle was championed and developed within Frank King's R&D organization by Irene Greif, formerly with MIT, and her team. It’s part of the solid groundwork King leaves to John Landry. The basic concept is simple: How do you get the software to maintain the conflicts and dependencies in scenarios 1, 2 and 3? How do you combine Juan's assumptions on costs (he’s the purchasing agent) with Alice’s knowledge of customer price elasticity (she’s the one in the field)? What’s the bottom line if Russia does better than expected but Italy does worse? Suppose you want to go back to your earlier pricing model but keep your current sales forecasts? Suppose you charged the overhead to the chairman's office instead of applying it to the widget department; how would operating costs look then? What if we scrap the intelligent widget project and invest in pens? The permutations and combinations of different people's assumptions sible to and scenarios can manage. rapidly become incomprehensible -- and impos- The Chronicle technology fits in between a file manager, which treats each spreadsheet as a monolithic object, and a database, which de facto treats each cell of a spreadsheet as a discrete data element. Working within a single spreadsheet, the technology manages a set of modules that can be selected and combined to compose a spreadsheet. It manages the integrity of each assumption-set and controls conflicts among them just as a database maintains the integrity of data elements, with each item a discrete piece. That is, it does not eliminate the conflicts, but keeps them from messing up the whole -- much as Alice could believe eight impossible things before breakfast behind the looking-glass.