Design, programming, and testing of The Desk Organizer were done primarily by myself, Don Huesman, George Milner, Ivars Villums, Maggie Kennedy, and Joe Mork.

The product met with wide critical acclaim, as is illustrated in the following excerpts from reviews. In the interest of full disclosure I note that this reproduces a page from a press kit that I had in my files, so it represents somewhat selective perception. Still, my recollection is that for the most part, critics and industry sorts, as well as a devoted population of several thousand regular users, really liked the program.

The five plus years of research and planning that went into creating The Desk Organizer are evident in its elegance and power. The program embodies a radical reconceptualization of "user-friendly" software.

I have had a chance to use this system for a while and am very impressed with its ease of use, logical design, and flexibility.

The Desk Organizer, from Conceptual Instruments Co., will vie for the most useful software package title with all serious users....just about the most useful thing to come around for the manager since 1-2-3, or maybe it's better, since you can run 1-2-3 from The Desk Organizer

On the whole, The Desk Organizer is so easy to use that its manual might be considered overkill.

The Desk Organizer is the kind of software package that may change a lot of people's minds about a computerized Rolodex. This is a superb software package.

Innovations as to new uses of the PC have been lagging. This gap is being filled by Warner Software...entering the market with a fabulous new product called "The Desk Organizer."

The Desk Organizer is an extremely powerful utility program that for many people could be a main reason for having a PC in the first place.

The big buzz in the biz right now is desk organizers. Somebody finally sat down at the keyboard with some monster database program and said to himself: "You know, this isn't the way people really work."...The most powerful of these new programs is called, appropriately enough, "The Desk Organizer." This is a dynamite program.

Certainly it's user friendly enough to be a "fun" program, but more importantly, it is a highly functional piece of software that is ingeniously designed to help its user increase productivity, organize his affairs, set up a sophisticated appointment calendar, make phone calls by pressing one button, calculate simple and complex mathematical problems and do word processing.

The idea of sweeping all those piles of desktop clutter into a computer's electronic memory is the basis of a new genre of program that David Bunnell, publisher of PC World and MacWorld Magazines, has called the most interesting software development this year. Bunnell gives credit for the idea to Fred Collopy, a computer programmer and adjunct professor at the Wharton School, whose Desk Organizer program introduced early this summer was the first of the type. "Collopy's program is likely to be a trailblazer in creating a new use for the small computer, " Bunnell said.

Warner Software may have come up with one of the best morale boosters for office workers fortunate enough to be using IBM PC equipment.

The Desk Organizer may be the first piece of business software that is a reason in itself for an executive to buy a personal computer.

If you would like to know how we at the On-Line America office think about it, it's the first program we boot up every morning, even before DOS, and the last program out of memory when we turn our PC off....All and all this is one heck of a piece of software. It's programs like this that lend credence to Bill Gate's vision of seeing a PC on every desk by 1987.

For IBM owners, few programs approach the usefulness of Warner Software's The Desk Organizer. The Desk Organizer is an instinctive, easy-to-operate system that can be run concurrently with other software.

My choice as the best software program I reviewed in the past 12 months is The Desk Organizer for the IBM PC. The Desk Organizer is a quality software program. Its design indicates not only ingenuity but common sense on the part of Conceptual Instruments company, which put the package together for Warner. This one earns a 95, and you may recall the rating rules here: The only way a program gets 100 is to cost nothing and run itself on your computer while you go to a ballgame or a movie.

Few personal computer users would say they couldn't use a tool like The Desk Organizer. It is a personal productivity tool, the kind of instrument a person can become attached to.

By the time you read this review, The Desk Organizer by Warner Software will already be among the best-selling Mac Programs, and will be on Apple's "favorite twenty" list, appearing in national ads sponsored by Apple. Why all these bold predictions? Because The Desk Organizer competes so well with other programs....I do believe Warner Software has decisively set the pace for the rest of the competition.

The Desk Organizer 's story is not a simple one. Years later I view it as a "critical success, box office failure." We pushed too hard against then current technology limits, attempting to do more than most machines were configured to do (today, of course, it can all be done elegantly in palmtop machines). This can likely be attributed to an optimistic assessment of how rapidly computing power would increase. In Warner's second year of marketing the product, Borland entered the market with a simpler program at a superior price ($80 vs. $295). The Desk Organizer was organized as an application, while Borland's SideKick was positioned as a utility. As such SideKick was leaner and faster. We responded too slowly to the competitive threat, particularly pricing. Borland's aggressive pricing constituted a change in how software was marketed, distributed, and supported. Their advertising focused on, and much of their sales volume was achieved through, direct mail. Ours was not the only product in the category to fail. Microsoft had killed their entry in the category, Time Manager, after only about six months. Spotlight by Dan Bricklin (the creator of VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet program), Get Organized by Electronic Arts (one of the largest pre-Lotus software publishers), and PopUps by Bellsoft were other desk managers that are no longer published (these products were compared in Whole Earth Review, 45, pp. 85 ff.).

In addition to product-related issues, there were some industry ones that may have been important as well. During this period, our publisher Time-Warner was under the threat of a hostile take over (by Rupert Murdoch), and Lotus, Microsoft, and Borland were transforming the nature of marketing and distribution in the industry.