Business & Technology

A Silicon Valley hero no one's ever heard of
Dan Bricklin has a new product and attitude

BY RUSS MITCHELL

Unlike Steven Jobs and Bill Gates, Daniel S. Bricklin is not a name that most people associate with the rise of the personal computer. But no history of Silicon Valley would be complete without a chapter on Bricklin. As a 29-year-old software programmer, Bricklin invented the computerized spreadsheet, the now indispensable number-crunching tool that businesspeople rely on to manage budgets and cast financial projections. Introduced in 1979, his VisiCalc program was one of the first "killer apps"-a truly useful software application that helped kick-start the fledgling market for PCs; many people bought their first Apple computers just to use it.

Alas, a lack of patent protection for VisiCalc plus other business mistakes deprived Bricklin of greater glory-not to mention riches. But now the bearded child of the Sixties is back, this time a bit savvier, with a product he hopes will revolutionize electronic documents the way VisiCalc revolutionized spreadsheets.

His latest software is called Trellix, sort of a word-processing program "for the era of the World Wide Web," as Bricklin puts it. The product is based on a self-evident truth: Most people, nerds included, hate reading on computer screens. The fuzz, glare, and clunkiness of today's computer monitors get most of the blame, but Bricklin thinks that's only part of the problem.

He's betting his new company, Trellix Corp. of Waltham, Mass., on the idea that most computer-screen readers loathe scrolling through long documents. At best, they'll skim; often they'll just give up.

That's a big problem for anyone disseminating large amounts of information-sales reports, for instance-on a computer. Traditional word-processing programs lock readers into a kind of long-scroll straitjacket, with no easy way to jump around documents by using Web-like "links."

People tend to browse, not read, when they're sitting at a computer, Bricklin says. So he built Trellix for browsing, modeling it on the Web. The brokerage PaineWebber, for instance, is putting its 6,000-page training and resource manual on Trellix. The result will be a Web-like resource with a "map" at the top that lets readers easily pinpoint the information they need.

They like it. A privately owned company, Trellix doesn't reveal its revenues and profits. President and CEO Russ Werner, former head of Microsoft's Windows 3.0 group, says more than a million copies of the program (list price: $100) have been sold since it was launched 14 months ago. Last November, the company released Trellix 2.0 (at a list price of $250) and is now packaging it with Corel's WordPerfect Office 2000, which competes with Microsoft's Office software package.

Interestingly, one of Trellix's big investors is Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corp. Lotus was the company that took Bricklin's original spreadsheet idea and turned it into a huge business success.

Kapor believes that Trellix has the potential to change radically the way people communicate via the written word. But he acknowledges that old habits die hard and that explaining Trellix to the uninitiated is no easy task. "It's a real marketing problem," he says.

Since the early spreadsheet days, Bricklin has learned a few business lessons. VisiCalc failed as a company not just because the product lacked patent protection but because his team fell behind more aggressive companies, such as Lotus and Microsoft, which possessed sharper marketing skills. It didn't help that Bricklin was busy elsewhere: While computer jocks like Gates had dropped out of college for the sake of their companies, Bricklin was busy finishing up a Harvard M.B.A. during VisiCalc's critical start-up phase.

This time around, he has hired tough patent attorneys, built a strong team of seasoned executives, and is devoting full attention to the job. If Trellix flies, the riches that eluded Bricklin at the dawn of the computer era may finally come his way. As for fame, well, he can live without it. "I wouldn't want to be Bill Gates," Bricklin insists. "You go to Belgium, and you get a pie thrown in your face."