But the reality is that even back then it was not a two-horse race, and our firm did consider other alternatives before picking P3. It may have had something to do with the fact that Primavera's headquarters were right across the river from our offices. Luckily, the consulting firm I was working for in the 1980s decided to buy P3 instead. In the early days it would have been very tempting to just buy Microsoft Project. And it is not like P3 had a big head start. Props for surviving even a few years! Granted, P3 was clearly a more robust scheduling program, but Microsoft Project was much cheaper. So imagine you are little ol' Primavera Systems facing down the biggest software company in the world. Lotus 123 and Lotus Symphony were no match for Microsoft either. Microsoft destroyed that product as well with Excel. But unless you are over the age of 50 it won't ring a bell. My first spreadsheet program was VisiCalc. Bye bye Navigator! (The irony is that Netscape Navigator started out as a free program to encourage its adoption, not unlike what Microsoft was doing). Internet Explorer was clunky compared to Navigator, but hey, free is hard to resist. Navigator was pretty cheap - I recall paying about $35 for the "Gold" version.īut when Microsoft released Windows 98 they included Internet Explorer for free. Like many people, I used Netscape Navigator in the early days of the World Wide Web. Microsoft does not like competition, to put it mildly. Microsoft Project was released the following year. In 1983, Primavera Systems released its eponymous scheduling program, Primavera Project Planner (P3). When I graduated from college we were scheduling projects using a mainframe computer. By the time I graduated in 1977 my calculus instructor had introduced us to a primitive desktop computer with a keyboard and no screen. My class was the first one not to learn how to use a mechanical slide rule, because hand-held calculators were becoming readily available. Might as well flip a coin to determine whether a program like P6 will survive because the results will be just as accurate.Ĭhange is inevitable. There are the "unknown unkowns" (as popularized by former Wall Street trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Black Swan) that are impossible to predict because we cannot even imagine that such a thing could happen. To begin with, none of us can accurately predict the future.
This is a great way to get people to read your blog, I suppose, but there is absolutely no reason to believe that Primavera P6 is a dinosaur happily living its life until some giant meteor program wipes it off the face of the Earth. Recently I read a blog by someone claiming that Primavera P6 will eventually disappear because there are much better scheduling programs now available.
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