“Before, the record keeping was ‘Go get a permit. Have you got it yet?’ There were no details, no backup. We relied on our field people to get the permits, and they would get the permits in a way that was timely for them and their production schemes but not in a way that was timely for us in bottom-line deliveries. So we are now able to target all the permit process and make it happen at our rate.” Not only was Bowie using Multiplan as a spreadsheet to plug in all the what ifs; he was also using it as a data base, even if it wasn’t as nimble in manipulating nonnumeric data as dBASE II could be.
Whatever chore Bowie was using Multiplan for, he loved the “Help” screens. He could turn them on to guide himself through the commands he wasn’t familiar with; besides, all of Multiplan’s basic commands were normally at the bottom of the screen, anyway.
Multiplan, by the time you’re reading this, may not be the best spreadsheet on the market, at least not for you. But at one point CPA Micro Report was pronouncing it the “new Empress of Spreadsheets” for accountants using a wide range of computers. Multiplan even worked with VisiCalc files so that users of the older program could easily convert.
“Multiplan,” said Micro Report, “... can sort a line-by-line record of events by account number or name—a frequent requirement in CPA applications.” Keepers of expense accounts, presumably, could cherish such a capability. Also, Multiplan, as the newsletter pointed out, lets you name your variables; you could refer more easily to the cells or the exact locations in the columns and rows. Instead of saying cells “A26” or “R38P,” you could refer to “Sales” and “Total Costs.”
With programs like Multiplan, software designers are more successfully catering to the needs of businesspeople who want computers to adjust to them rather than the other way around. That’s how it should be. Bowie is a construction executive, not a computer expert, and Boland’s an accountant rather than a hacker.
Bowie, however, plainly seemed more willing to live with the complexities of existing software. Many in his place would have used a consultant—and wisely, I think, for Washington Homes was a multimillion-dollar operation—yet Bowie had the background and patience to computerize just with guidance from a store. He might not have been a computer expert. But he loved the new. He loved complexity if he could logically unravel it. He didn’t mind mistakes. He felt in control because he had backups on disk and on paper. The manuals didn’t scare him. Instead of soaking up every word there, Bowie, like Seymour Rubinstein, had a gift for knowing which page to flip to if he had trouble. Bowie was a born micro user. However serious about his job, he might as well have been a child relaxing after school with a few rounds of Pac-Man. He loved seeing instant cause-and-effect relationships. He took as much delight in learning where his division could be six months hence as a child might take in winning an arcade game. He considered his computer “the greatest therapy in the world,” an opportunity to “sit down and feel really good” in “a fairly high tension business.”
Edward Boland, too, however, in a different, more structured way, was curious about numbers and life, and in the end, I suspect, the two men’s learning styles didn’t entirely explain their opinions of their programs. Bolands’ general-ledger software just wasn’t right for his needs. It straitjacketed him. Bowie’s programs, on the other hand, helped him do just about anything he wanted.
“Anything,” incidentally, included advancing his career. When I next caught up with him, in May 1984, he was president of another construction firm and owned one-third of that company and was taking home a paycheck thirty-five percent bigger. Bowie said his computer skills “had a great deal to do with it. I had management tools that not very many other people had.”
Alan Scharf: Integrated Program, Including Graphics
Alan Scharf, a forty-three-year-old New York executive, also has a nice touch with software—a good-enough one, in fact, to have helped win him a job at a blue-chip firm at triple his old salary.