Informix WingZ
| Original author(s) | Innovative Software |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 1988 |
| Operating system | Macintosh, Microsoft Windows, OS/2, NeXTSTEP, Unix |
| Type | spreadsheet |
Wingz was a spreadsheet program sold by Informix in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Originally developed for the Macintosh, it was later distributed on Microsoft Windows, OS/2, NeXTSTEP and several other commercial flavors of Unix. In spite of many positive reviews, including one calling it "clearly the spreadsheet of the future", the market was rapidly entrenching Microsoft Excel. Informix eventually gave up on the desktop market and reverted solely to database sales in the mid-1990s. Claris licensed and sold an extensively cleaned up version as Claris Resolve in 1991, but it was far too late to market to have any effect.
Wingz was originally written solely for the Macintosh by Innovative Software in Lenexa, KS (publishers of the SmartWare Suite on the PC) and was ready for release in late 1988. Informix wanted to enter the desktop software market with products that could link to their back-end databases, and Wingz seemed like a good fit. They purchased the product and released it largely as-is in early 1989. The release was built up by extensive promotion on the part of Informix, including giving away a then-unprecedented array of "convention swag," including high quality Wingz red canvas tradeshow bags. For nearly a year, the buildup was focused around the "Wingz Time Shuttle," an enclosed theatre which traveled MacWorlds in 1988 and 1989. The focal creatives included a video narrated by Leonard Nimoy and automated demos of the product. The video took attendees into "the future of spreadsheet design, past the legacy of failed old products [like Excel]".
The most obvious feature, and the easiest to "checkbox review", was the size of the spreadsheets Wingz could process. Excel's maximum size was 256 columns by 16384 rows, while Wingz could handle spreadsheets up to 32768 in both directions. At the time spreadsheets were still being compared primarily on this feature. A less-obvious feature was that Wingz allowed simple in-cell editing, whereas contemporary versions of Excel forced you to use a separate data-entry bar.
Another clear difference between Wingz and Excel was Wingz' powerful graphing system, once regarded as the most powerful available in any spreadsheet. Wingz' graphing system allowed the resulting graphs to be placed directly in the spreadsheets. At the time Excel offered an anemic variety of 2D graphs, and they could only be displayed in a separate view. Additionally Wingz made it easy to make the graphs and modify them, allowing you to see your changes in real-time directly in the spreadsheet where the changes were being made. At the time it was an "obvious" feature, but one that no other program had managed to make work correctly.
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