CalendarCentral

» see calendarcentral.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

CalendarCentral released version 4.0 of its product on 1 February 2001. Twenty days later it announced that it was closing. The press release is still in the archive, dated 21 February 2001, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and it carries a headline that reads like a classified ad: "CalendarCentral Seeks to Find an Acquirer or License its Intellectual Property".

It had been a different company at the start. The first archived front page, from May 1998, is selling shrink-wrap: "We're currently shipping Calendar Central Version 1.4", with links for an overview, a live demo, a free download and pricing, aimed at corporate intranets and online communities. You bought a web calendar, you installed it on your own server, and that was the business. By 2000 the name had closed up into one word and the pitch had moved to where everybody's pitch moved, which was enterprise collaboration. The description on the 2001 pages calls it the only web-based business calendar designed to share and filter event information across organizational boundaries.

Underneath the language it was doing something people still want. The company's phrase for it was three-dimensional filtering, meaning a calendar whose events came from several organizations at once and which showed you a view assembled for your particular job rather than one shared wall of entries. It shipped an XML API and published a white paper about it in Word format, partnered with a company called 2Bridge, and collected about a hundred customers.

~ the record ~

~ the customer list ~

The names in the February press release are better than the company's size would predict: Goldman Sachs and NASA are both listed as customers, and the boilerplate paragraph adds Visa, Novell, Hewlett-Packard, US West, Legato, Iomega and Informix. That is a serious enterprise roster for a company that would turn out to have thirteen people left.

This is the part of the internet I can read about but would never have touched. Enterprise calendar software sold out of North Carolina to Fortune 500 purchasing departments is about as far from a Turkish dial-up account in 1999 as software gets. I am writing it down because the shape of the failure is unusually legible, not because I was anywhere near it.

~ what two point three million buys ~

The release is unusually frank about money, in the way that companies only are when there is nothing left to protect. In total, it says, CalendarCentral had raised $2.3 million from various angel investors active in the RTP area. Not a round. The whole company, over four years, on less money than a single Series A of that era, from people in its own region.

CEO Dennis Phillips, who had come from being CFO at Ganymede Software and had taken that company through its sale to NetIQ in April 2000, put the reason plainly: "given market conditions and the specific nature of our application, we do not believe that CalendarCentral can remain viable as a standalone business." A few employees had been cut at the end of 2000 and a bridge round raised to keep the lights on while M&A options were explored. The bridge ran out first.

~ three weeks ~

The sequence is what makes this one worth keeping. Version 4.0 shipped on 1 February, described by the company as the only enterprise calendar enabling true B2B collaboration, and it was still being announced on the front page as a new release when the closing notice went up alongside it. On 1 April 2001 the news column on the homepage still leads with "CalendarCentral closing doors, seeks acquirer or licensee", and directly beneath it, unedited, sits "CalendarCentral Enhances 3-D Enterprise Collaboration with its 4.0 Release".

The remaining thirteen employees left on 28 February 2001, though the release notes that some might be kept on temporarily to finish integration work for whoever bought the code. The press contact at the bottom, Vickie Morano, Director of Marketing, was presumably one of the thirteen. Nobody bought it. The site sat unchanged until mid-2001 and then went dark, and when calendarcentral.com reappeared years later it was a parking page selling comic book news.

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