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Comment by ggchappell | Hacker News Reader

I'm afraid that point doesn't work so well here. After Lotus brought out 1-2-3 a few years later, VisiCalc didn't do so well. VisiCorp was dead less than 2 years after the release of 1-2-3. One could argue that a patent would have kept VisiCorp alive. (Admittedly, part of the failure of the company was due to litigation with the authors of VisiCalc.)

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Exactly. Innovation in the field of spreadsheet programs would have completely stagnated by keeping it limited to a company that was clearly done innovating. Their lack of further innovation would only have been greater with a monopoly.

So what? Consumers preferred 1-2-3 to VisiCalc, that's how markets works. Society doesn't have to guarantee anybody a market share if their products are inferior.

It could be argued that without VisiCalc, 1-2-3 might never have existed. After all, besides the development work, VisiCalc had also done all the hard work of creating and validating a new market. If somebody does all that work only to be displaced by someone else who has the benefit of hindsight, what is the incentive for taking big risks?

> Society doesn't have to guarantee anybody a market share if their products are inferior.

Of course not. But it remains true that your original argument doesn't work here.

I imagine you're generally against software patents. So am I. But don't hold up VisiCalc as a poster child for software development without patents, because in the long run it was very much a failure as a product, and the company that sold it went broke, while this might not have happened had they patented it.

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