iRows

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

~ the obituary ~

A product that opens in january and closes on the last day of december does not get a generation of users. It gets a few thousand people who read technology blogs. In 2006 I had ttnet broadband at home and was an engineering student who kept every calculation in Excel, on the machine, in a file with a name I had to remember. The idea that a spreadsheet could live at a URL was in the air that year, but the company doing it properly was gone before the idea arrived where I was.

iRows was two developers in Israel, Yoah Bar-David and Itai Raz. What they shipped was a spreadsheet drawn in the browser with Ajax and XML, close enough to Excel that you did not have to relearn anything. Formulas and charts behaved the way they behaved in a desktop application. It stayed in beta for its whole life, which in 2006 was less an admission than a badge.

The part that was actually new was what happened after you finished the file. You could hand somebody a link instead of an attachment, and two people could sit in the same sheet at the same time. You could also publish a sheet into a blog post and have it stay live. Every one of those is now so ordinary that describing it feels like describing a door, and in 2006 it was the argument for why the browser should be allowed to hold your work at all.

~ the case file ~

~ the slide ~

The money never worked. iRows was free, paid for by advertising, and storing other people's spreadsheets costs real money every day whether anybody looks at them or not. The founders said it plainly on their own blog when it ended: the site was not generating enough to keep them alive. That is the whole failure, and it is a failure of arithmetic rather than of engineering.

Google shipped Google Spreadsheets in june 2006, six months into iRows' life, and gave it away with the same storage problem attached and a search business underneath to pay for it. The founders were careful afterward to say the google launch had nothing to do with them, which is both true and beside the point. One of the two had a reason to keep paying the bill.

~ what really happened ~

In november 2006 Google hired both founders, sending them to the Tel Aviv and Haifa research offices. Israeli press called it Google's first israeli acquisition, though what changed hands was two people and not the company: the founders kept the intellectual property in iRows and the site was closed rather than absorbed. Signups stopped immediately. Existing users were given until 31 december to move their files to Google Spreadsheets, and what was not moved was deleted.

Google had done the same thing months earlier with Gtalkr, hiring the people and closing the product. In 2006 it was still novel enough to need explaining in the press. The industry now has a word for it and treats it as an ordinary exit, which means the thing that happened to iRows stopped being news at some point between then and now.

~ what replaced it ~

Nothing of iRows survives as code. What survives is the position it took, which is that a spreadsheet is a document with an address rather than a file on a disk, and that two people should be able to be inside one at once. Every browser spreadsheet since has been built on that, including the one its founders went to work on. Eleven months was enough time to be right and not nearly enough to be paid for it.

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