Ovation Technologies

~ the last words ~

The company died the year I was born, in a country I had never been to, over a product that was never made. There is nothing to have missed. Ovation exists only as a name that a generation of trade reporters used as a warning, and the reason it stayed in the vocabulary that long is that it did every part of a software launch correctly except the part where software comes out of it.

Thomas J. Gregory started it in Canton, Massachusetts in December 1982, briefly under the name Spectrum Group. The market it aimed at was the one everybody wanted in 1983: integrated software for the IBM PC, several applications sharing one data model, so that a number in the spreadsheet could appear in the letter and the chart without being retyped. Lotus 1-2-3 had shipped that January and was consuming the whole category. Ovation was going to be the five-application answer to it.

They raised several million dollars, signed a distribution agreement with Tandy including co-marketing on the Tandy 2000, and hired Robert Kutnik to lead the design. Then in November 1983 they announced. The demos went out to the press, the reviews were written from those demos, and the launch was staged at Windows on the World on top of the World Trade Center, which for a Massachusetts software startup was an enormous amount of theater to buy.

Nothing shipped. In May 1984 InfoWorld ran a piece on the pile of announced-but-absent integrated suites and noted that of the four in the market's imagination, only Visi On had actually reached buyers. Ovation filed for bankruptcy before the end of that year, having spent around seven million dollars to produce a press conference and no product.

~ the record ~

~ the demo ~

The interesting question is whether the demos were fraud, and the answer as far as anyone has reconstructed it is no. There was code. It ran. It ran the specific path a demonstrator walks in front of an audience, on a machine that had been prepared, and the distance between that and a product a stranger installs from a box has broken far more competent companies than this one.

What Ovation did was announce from that position. In 1983 the trade press would print an announcement as news, dealers would take orders against it, and a competitor's shipping product could lose a quarter of sales to a rumor. The incentive to announce early was overwhelming and the penalty for missing was assumed to be small. Ovation is the case that showed the penalty was not small, because the announcement is what set the clock running on money the company did not have.

~ what got buried with it ~

The word vaporware came into general use in this period and Ovation is the example usually attached to it. That is a strange thing to be remembered for: not a product, not a failure of a product, but the moment an industry noticed that announcements are cheap and started discounting them. Every "when it is ready" and every refusal to give a date traces back through a line of cases like this one.

The integrated suite idea did not die with the company. Lotus tried it properly with Symphony in 1984 and Ashton-Tate with Framework the same year, and none of them won, because what actually took the category was Microsoft binding separate applications together and selling them as Office. The all-in-one program that Ovation could not finish turned out not to be the answer anyway. Forty-two years later the only thing left of the company is a cautionary noun.

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