It looks as though this is the end of the road for EditGrid. According to the EditGrid blog:
I’m excited to announce that we are making some changes to our business that will allow the EditGrid Team to focus on developing new and exciting web apps. As a result, you will see the following changes to the current EditGrid product and service offerings:
- Effective today all EditGrid.com online services will now be available for free, including our premium subscription services. (Click here for more details if you are currently a paying subscriber.)
- Effective today, we are discontinuing sales of our EditGrid Standard and EditGrid Confluence Plugin software licenses. (Click here for more details on support if you are a current licensing customer.)
- Effective 30 days from now on 2009-10-24, the following remote data services and third party applications will no longer be available: (Click here for more details if you currently use one of the below services.)
- Remote Data:
- E-Commerce: Amazon and eBay
- Economic and financial: Yahoo! Finance, StrikeIron Census and StrikeIron Zacks
- Web analytics: Alexa
- Others: Yahoo! Maps
- Third Party Applications:
- Salesforce.com, AppExchange, EditGrid Facebook App, and EditGrid Labs
We shall continue to keep our current support documentation available at https://wiki.editgrid.com/. However, in order to focus our resources on new R&D efforts, email and forum user support for EditGrid.com shall be discontinued 30 days from now on 2009-10-24.
Detailed answers about the changes can be found in this Q&A.
I don’t care how excited the author is, I can’t imagine its users will be overly pleased. The fact the company is dropping support for services like Salesforce.com and AppExchange tells me this is a dead service. At least for the time being.
I’ve not been able to speak with the EditGrid team but I suspect the company could not find a way of building sufficient paid momentum to justify continuing development or support for the service. I understand they’d done well in the Far East and Japan in particular but they could never build the market buzz in Europe or the US that would have given them genuine access to large numbers of users. This is a great pity because I’d always liked the way EditGrid tried to take the notion of a spreadsheet and turn it into a useful tool for the financial community. I know of several analyst houses that were using EditGrid to good effect but a handful of power users won’t pay the bills.
They were always going to be up against it with Excel being the default and Zoho having a basket of other applications with which it can persuade customers. I also believe they missed the opportunity to make a concerted effort to get their message out in the west. I recall asking them about go to market some years ago and was told they’d rely on viral word of mouth. Good idea at the time but business applications need more than that.
Despite the idea that apps should be free or very low cost, the developer still has to eat. With insufficient paying customers, it doesn’t matter how good the service, it eventually dies. One assumes EditGrid tried to sell the code in the hope a specialist vendor could turn it into something more valuable but without success. The warning here is simple: when services die, they can end up screwing up other services upon which you might rely. In fairness, EditGrid may yet be rescued. I can think of several companies that ought to take over the code. But that’s for another day.
