Spinnaker Software

~ the eulogy ~

Spinnaker Software was founded on 1 April 1982 in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Bill Bowman and C. David Seuss, and the thing it got right was not technical. Home computers were being bought by parents who had been told the machine would help their children, and those parents did not read Byte. Spinnaker ran full-color advertisements in Good Housekeeping and Newsweek, which nobody in software was doing, and it put the programs in bright, durable plastic boxes at a moment when the industry standard was a ziplock bag with a photocopied sheet in it.

The Christmas 1982 lineup was four titles. FaceMaker and The Story Machine came from DesignWare in San Francisco, and two Snooper Troops detective games came from Tom Snyder Productions. None of them were curriculum software. They were games that a parent could be persuaded were educational, which is a different product and a much larger market, and Spinnaker was the first company to work out how to sell it at low prices in volume.

The spending was enormous relative to the business. In 1983 Spinnaker put 1.5 million dollars into advertising against 11.1 million dollars of sales, and by 1984 there was an industry rumor that the company was running out of cash. It was not. By early 1984 InfoWorld reckoned Spinnaker the sixteenth largest microcomputer software company in the world, and from 1983 to 1988 it sat at the top of the educational software charts more or less continuously, with Snooper Troops reaching the overall bestselling games list.

This entire retail category is one I only ever read about. By the time I had a machine of my own, software still arrived as a copy from somebody who already had it, and the question of what the box looked like never came up because there was no box. Spinnaker's whole business was a parent standing in an American department store deciding that the thing in the brightly colored package would be good for their child. That transaction did not exist where I was, and the first time I understood what Spinnaker had been was reading scanned InfoWorld issues decades after the company was gone.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

The catalog got strange in interesting ways. Kidwriter, by Jim and Jack Pejsa, was a storybook authoring tool and the first word processor built specifically for children, while Alphabet Zoo came from Dale Disharoon, a schoolteacher in Chico, California. In Search of the Most Amazing Thing, another Tom Snyder title, was an open-ended exploration game with a soundtrack and a novella in the box, and it is still the one people bring up first.

From 1984 Spinnaker started splitting the catalog into brands so it could take more retail shelf space. There was a Fisher-Price line, licensed from the toy company, which Spinnaker built and marketed and paid royalties on. In October 1984 it founded two subsidiaries at once: Telarium for adults and Windham Classics for children, both publishing illustrated interactive fiction adapted from books, with the original authors involved. Telarium's Amazon was developed with Michael Crichton. Game development there was managed by Seth Godin, some years before anybody knew who that was.

~ the unraveling ~

Consumer computer buying fell off in the mid to late 1980s, and the machines that survived were not the ones Spinnaker had built its catalog for. The market moved away from the Commodore and Atari machines that sat in living rooms and toward IBM PC clones that sat on desks and ran business software. Spinnaker read this correctly and acted on it, which is the part that eventually cost it the identity it had: it phased out the educational and entertainment titles and turned itself into a productivity software company, starting with the BetterWorking brand in 1985.

~ what it became ~

The second Spinnaker was an acquisition machine on the budget end of business software. It bought Springboard Software in 1990 and picked up the budget publisher Power Up! Software the year after. In January 1991 it took the PFS line of applications off Software Publishing Corporation, the company behind Harvard Graphics. Its own bestseller was WindowWorks, an integrated productivity package that beat the Windows version of Microsoft Works to market by two years and became the first software title bundled with a Compaq machine aimed at ordinary buyers rather than corporate ones. Spinnaker went public on NASDAQ in 1991.

In 1994 The Learning Company bought it, and the Spinnaker name went out of use. The Learning Company was itself later bought by Mattel, in a deal that is remembered as one of the worst acquisitions of the decade.

~ the inheritance ~

The staff list reads oddly now. Seth Godin ran Telarium's games. Kevin O'Leary worked there before television. What outlasted all of it is the marketing insight rather than any product. The buyer of children's software is not the user, and that buyer is reached through magazines about running a household rather than through anything the industry read. Every educational software company that followed was working inside a channel Spinnaker built, and then Spinnaker walked out of it.

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