EditGrid

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

~ the obituary ~

i remember when spreadsheets moved into the browser, around 2006 and 2007, and it felt like a small magic trick. i landed on google's version, the way almost everyone did. editgrid was the one the serious spreadsheet people pointed to instead, and i only ever read about it.

editgrid came out of team and concepts, a small company in hong kong, and its public beta opened in april 2006, right around the time google was buying writely and turning it into docs. editgrid was, by most accounts, the more capable spreadsheet, with live data feeds and an api that google's did not match. it went out of beta and launched paid accounts in early 2007, and among people who cared about online spreadsheets it had a real reputation.

being better was not the deciding factor. apple quietly acquired editgrid on june 1, 2008, an acqui-hire to help build iwork.com, its early web version of the office suite. by september 2009 editgrid had stopped taking new subscriptions and stopped adding features, kept running only so existing users could get their data out. it hung on in that frozen state until it was finally shut down on may 1, 2014. the team went to apple, the spreadsheet that had out-featured google went quiet, and google docs won the category by being the default rather than the best.

~ the case file ~

~ better did not win ~

editgrid is a clean case of the more powerful product losing to the more convenient one. it did things google sheets took years to match, and it did them from a small hong kong team on a fraction of the resources. none of that beat being bundled with a google account most of its likely users already had. distribution beat capability, the way it almost always does on the web.

~ where it went ~

the engineering went into apple's short-lived iwork.com, and then into whatever came after that inside cupertino. the editgrid brand stayed up as a read-only ghost for almost six years, a spreadsheet you could open but no longer really use, until 2014 closed it for good. as an engineer i still hold a small respect for the thing. a tiny team in hong kong built the best online spreadsheet of its moment and got bought for the people who built it, not the product they shipped.

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