Chris Herot on RulesBase

Chris Herot writes about a new product called RulesBase: Check out this post from Christopher Herot's Weblog:

"I had a visit yesterday from Steven Ginzberg and Jack Schatz of Gray Box Software. They showed me a new financial analysis and modeling tool - RulesBase.

A mutual friend had noticed a resemblance to a product from my first start- up, Javelin Software, and suggested they seek my advice. I've spent quite a bit of time recently advising startups on other technologies with which I've worked - audio, video, wireless, social networks - but this was definitely a flash from the past.

Javelin was a financial modeling package that was based on formulas instead of cells, and used GUI and windowing before Windows (Steve Balmer paid us a visit and asked us to consider porting it). It beat Excel for Infoworld's Software Product of the Year, much to the consternation of Bill Gates. The company never did displace Lotus 123, but Lotus did pay the compliment of implementing many of Javelin's features in Lotus Improv. The company was acquired by IRI which later became part of Oracle.

(from : RulesBase)

One other product in the 'everything old is new again ' category is Quantrix, who say:

"Frustrated with error-prone, inflexible spreadsheets? Quantrix is multi- dimensional business modeling & analytics software used by business and finance professionals for: Forecasting, Budgeting, Strategic Planning, Risk Modeling, Data Modeling, Much More…."

Unlike RulesBase, which so far is only available on Windows, Quantrix works on Windows and Mac (and Linux).More fun and interesting for me, Quantrix is based on a fairly faithful knock-off of Lotus Improv, with improvemetns and additions. Very cool!