Dan Bricklin has released alpha code for a new product he’s calling WikiCalc . It looks like kind of a multi-user spreadsheet. It’s hard to explain and I’m not sure I grasp the concept completely myself but you can imagine the potential for groups to share access to a tool that kind of lets them build a forecast or a business plan. I suspect at most companies the process of building a sales forecast, for example, is pretty messy. Spreadsheets get passed around by e-mail and consolidated manually and if someone has an interesting insight it simply gets thrown into the chaos. If you could create a way to construct forecasts iteratively with a tracking system that lets you see who contributed what, it would be pretty powerful. I’m sure Dan has thought this through a lot better then I have.

Keep your eye on wikis, by the way. While there’s nothing new about the concept of collaborative decision-making (Lotus Notes was doing some of this stuff 15 years ago), wikis bring an open, Internet-based structure to the process. There’ll be a lot of development activity around this platform.