Metaphor Computer Systems

~ the last words ~

David Liddle had run the Xerox Star program at PARC. Donald Massaro had run Xerox's disk business. In 1982 both of them left and founded Metaphor Computer Systems in Mountain View, on the premise that PARC's ideas were worth more sold to people who analyze numbers for a living than to people who write code.

The workstation shipped in September 1984. Motorola 68000, Ethernet, one megabyte of RAM, and a set of infrared cordless input devices that docked into the desktop unit to recharge: keyboard, numeric pad, five-function keypad, and a cordless mouse that Logitech designed. That was the first commercial appearance of cordless input on a computer, four years before most people saw a mouse of any kind. Mike Nuttall did the industrial design and James Yurchenco engineered the machine at David Kelley Design, both firms later folded into IDEO, and the thing won a gold medal from the industrial designers' association.

By 1987 revenue was $39.7 million. IBM bought a stake in April 1988 alongside Procter & Gamble and Nielsen, which tells you exactly who the customer was. In 1990 Metaphor stopped selling hardware and moved its software onto the IBM PS/2, and the two companies set up a joint venture called Patriot Partners to build object-oriented business software. IBM chose not to capitalize the venture. It bought the Metaphor software division outright in 1991 instead and ran it as a subsidiary. The hardware and repair side was spun out as Sequence Support Services and stopped operating in May 1993. Metaphor itself ceased operations in October 1994.

~ the record ~

~ what the machine was for ~

Metaphor called its software a Data Interpretation System, and the shape of it is still unusual. On screen you got icons for a database gateway, a spreadsheet, a plotting tool, mail and printing, and you connected them with arrows into a workflow. Then you ran the workflow and the arrows animated while the data moved through. A saved workflow was called a Capsule, named after the space capsules, and it was a batch program that a marketing analyst could build without ever hearing the word batch.

The buyer was a brand manager at a consumer goods company who wanted last week's supermarket numbers cut a different way. Nobody in that job was going to write SQL. Metaphor's entire bet was that if you drew the query instead of typing it, an analyst would run ten times as many of them, and the bet was correct, which is why Procter & Gamble and Nielsen put money in rather than just buying seats.

~ ibm, twice ~

The 1991 purchase was not really about Metaphor's customers. IBM was assembling an object-oriented software strategy with Apple at the time, and Patriot Partners was the piece meant to produce it. When the New York Times covered the acquisition that July, the headline framed it as buying Metaphor to help the Apple plan. Liddle was hired by IBM that November. He left to co-found Interval Research with Paul Allen the following year.

An acquisition that exists to feed a strategy has no reason to keep the acquired product alive once the strategy moves. Metaphor spent three years inside IBM as a subsidiary and then stopped, and the pieces got scattered: hardware into Sequence, which died in 1993, and the software into IBM's stack, where it survived under a new name.

~ where it ended up ~

In March 2000 IBM licensed the Metaphor technology, by then called the IBM Intelligent Decision Server, to a company that renamed itself Meta5 around it. So the code outlived the company by decades in an enterprise product almost nobody has heard of, which is the standard fate for anything IBM absorbs.

I have no personal purchase on any of this. Metaphor sold a five-figure workstation seat by seat to corporate analysts in the United States and stopped selling hardware before I ever touched a computer. The cordless mouse is the part that reaches me: I have owned several and assumed the idea arrived with laptops, and it turns out it shipped in 1984 on a machine that never appeared in a shop window anywhere.

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