In the LinkedIn updates email I received this morning, one of my friends, Doug Bliss from DougWare, found an interesting LinkedIn poll regarding the use of spreadsheets. The poll was quite telling in our business as there seems to have been this running battle over the years in the Hyperion world: spreadsheets or web?
When Arbor first rolled out Essbase, the spreadsheet was king and the web was basically a gov't research project. Many of us in the Essbase world started out back then and still consider the spreadsheet king. By the summer of 2000, Hyperion had taken a new direction and declared that everyone in the Hyperion world would dump spreadsheets for the web.
I remember the Sales Kickoff in Miami Beach in the summer of 2000 when the mantra was that everyone in the Hyperion world, from the development side, would embrace and love Java and that other technologies, such as Visual Basic, would be abandoned en masse. In the end, Microsoft abandoned the (classic) Visual Basic world before Hyperion developers.
The LinkedIn poll shows the spreadsheet is still strong which, of course, we all knew all along. We have focused our company, and in particular on our Dodeca product, on the fact that the spreadsheet is king. Our aim is to leverage the spreadsheet concept but to make it easy enough that all users in a company can use them to get the information they need to do their jobs.
Take a look at the poll, and vote if you are so inclined, at http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/34682/gripr.
