Climbing To The Top Of The Charts

Microcomputer software sales are heading for the stratosphere. But the most popular programs aren't necessarily the best.

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The hottest disks these days aren't those in jukeboxes. "Software is moving faster than records," says Computer Merchandising magazine publisher Bill Slapin, who hired Billboard magazine's veteran chart manager, Jim Muccione, to track the best-selling software programs for his trade publication. Despite Muccione's transferable skills, a substantial difference exists between the top 40 records and the blockbusters of the software industry.

Pop tunes tend to be overnight sensations. While the same is true for computer-game programs, most measures of business software sales -- including INC.'s Top 10 list -- are dominated by golden oldies. Records will spin on any brand of stereo; software programs run only on specific microcomputers.

And the numbers necessary for a software disk to soar to the top are much lower than the million copies it takes to earn a gold platter. VisiCalc and WordStar, for example, have each sold 500,000 copies since their introduction in 1979; SuperCalc, 250,000; PFS File, 130,000; and dBASE II about 120,000. "Any program that sells 10,000 a month would be way, way up there," says Bill Coggshall, president of Software Access International Inc., a new software market research firm in Mountain View, Calif.

A word of caution: Any best-sellers list should be viewed with some skepticism. "There really are no hard numbers out for any of these [programs]," says Egil Juliussen, chairman of Future Computing Inc., a Richardson, Tex., personal computer market research firm. "Everybody looks at it from a little different perspective and has different kinds of information."

One factor that can skew the numbers is "bundling," or giving away software with hardware. Every Osborne I computer sold, for example, comes with a copy of WordStar and SuperCalc. "You don't measure software sales when you measure that," says Al Tommervik, publisher of Softalk Publishing Co. "You measure Osborne sales."

INC.'s lineup is based on information from the industry's leading analysts and list makers. Still, what does achieving best-seller status mean? "The implication is you become a best-seller by being the best, and these are not by any means the best programs," says Jeffrey Tarter, publisher of Soft-letter, a Cambridge, Mass.-based newsletter for the software industry. They're simply the ones that are promoted most aggressively and are most generically useful, or in some cases are the oldest or best known."

Certainly all the best-sellers are intended for general applications -- financial modeling and accounting, word processing, filing and manipulating data. It is not surprising, then, that on a list of top-selling business software, three of the packages -- VisiCalc, SuperCalc, and Multiplan -- are electronic spread-sheets, while Lotus 1-2-3, an integrated package that combines, on one disk, financial modeling, graphics, database management, and limited word-processing capabilities (see INC., June, page 103) is primarily an enhanced spreadsheet.

So far, VisiCalc's reputation has keptit on top of the heap. And most of those who use only the original spreadsheet are satisfied. Irving Lang, for instance, president of Irving Lang Inc., a 26-person, New York City-based company that manufactures castings for the jewelry industry, bought the well-publicized program last year, after it was recommended by his computer dealer and demonstrated during a programming course. Lang would consider changing to Lotus 1-2-3" down the road," but for now finds VisiCalc more than adequate. "VisiCalc is so brilliant, such a marvelous piece of work," he says, "that every time I sit down [with it] I bless the writers of that program."

SuperCalc, the second oldest spreadsheet on the list, has a few advantages over VisiCalc. The commands are "significantly easier to use," says Allan Brewster King, product manager of Microcon Computer & Software Centers Inc. in Watertown, Mass. And column widths can be either globally or individually varied. Overall, however, the VisiCalc clone is not that different from the original. SuperCalc owed its initial appeal to the fact that, unlike VisiCalc, it would run on micros with CP/M operating systems, such as Zenith and TeleVideo. VisiCorp, says Egil Juliussen, "left that door open for SuperCalc to take. Then people got comfortable with it, so they stayed with it."

While VisiCalc and SuperCalc exemplify the staying power of business software, the presence of Multiplan and 1-2-3 on the list suggests that reputations can also be made very quickly -- with smart marketing and hefty advertising budgets. Both of these programs, though, are "second-generation" and represent significant advances over the earlier spreadsheets. (VisiCalc and SuperCalc have both released their own second-generation versions -- VisiCalc Advanced Version and SuperCalc 2 -- which have many of the same functions as Multiplan.)

"I threw away VisiCalc as soon as I got into [Multiplan]," says Bob Russell, who uses the program to keep track of payroll, estimate job costs, and draw up quarterly reports for Drinkwater Russell Construction Inc., his eight-employee construction company in Portland, Ore. "It s so much easier to use." Russell particularly likes being able to copy information automatically from up to eight different spreadsheets back to one spreadsheet and summarize it. "I use that quite a bit in figuring some bigger job costs," he says.

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