Layered, Inc.

~ the eulogy ~

Layered died when I was six, in a country where a Macintosh was a machine you read about rather than one you used. Boston accounting software for the Mac in 1990 is about as far from anything in my life as a dead company gets, and it earns a page here for a narrower reason. It was the best thing in its category, told so in print at the time, and the category was what killed it.

The company was based in Boston and built chiefly for Apple's Macintosh. Stephen Burakoff and Eric Levine founded it, William Savoy was president, and there were thirty-one people on the books in 1990. The Insight Expert Accounting family went on sale in 1985, shown at Macworld Expo alongside the first wave of serious Mac business packages. A second product, atOnce!, arrived in 1989 aimed at small businesses that wanted their books kept without hiring anyone to keep them.

By the summer of 1990 Layered was considered the market leader in accounting software for the Macintosh. On 4 August 1990 the Boston Globe ran the notice under the headline "Ga. Firm Acquires Layered, Inc." The buyer was Peachtree Software of Norcross, Georgia, whose name was on one of the standard accounting packages for the IBM PC, and atOnce! came back afterward as Peachtree Accounting for Macintosh.

~ the dossier ~

~ the rolls-royce review ~

On 20 October 1986 InfoWorld ran Richard Morochove's review under the headline "Layered Offers High-Class Accounting System", and inside it was the line that stuck to the company until the end: the Rolls-Royce of Macintosh accounting software. That is a specific compliment. A Rolls-Royce is built better than the alternatives and sold to very few people.

Every word of it held. The software was thorough in a way that accountants noticed and the price matched, which left an audience of whoever had decided to run a business on a Macintosh in 1986. That was not many people. The Mac had won its commercial foothold in design and publishing, where the screen was the product, and the back office stayed on the PC where the spreadsheets already were.

~ norcross, georgia ~

The arithmetic did not work. From 1985 to 1990 the Macintosh business installed base grew nothing like fast enough to carry a specialist accounting house, however good the accounting was. Peachtree, already the volume name on the other platform, bought the leader of the smaller one, renamed its product and had the Mac side of the category for the price of a thirty-one person company.

The record of all this is thin to the point of comedy. There is an InfoWorld review, a Globe headline, a line in the Encyclopedia of Microcomputers recording the rename, and an encyclopedia entry whose founding-date field is empty because nobody ever wrote the date down. A company can be the best thing on a platform and still leave less behind than a single bad game.

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