Obituary to iRows
Yesterday the founders of iRows announced that they’ll be joining Google and that the iRows site will be shut down on 31st December, confirming the Techcrunch story two days ago. Here’s the related story on Techcrunch.
iRows was launched in February 2006, two months before EditGrid’s first Public Beta, and has been a strong player in the new-and-emerging arena of online spreadsheets. It’s the first one to support sorting, charting among other features that have since become a must for all online spreadsheets. Many of our features were planned and developed with a strong if subconscious driving force in our mind: we have to better iRows in this. It’s a tough race, intense but dignified — we have never badmouthed them in private and, as far as we are concerned, neither have they. And it’s a race that we’ve been gaining the upper hand lately, according to this comparison spreadsheet by our user siulung. We believe that competition is good to users and will drive everyone forward, and so it’s proved.
We feel deeply about iRows’ termination at the frontline. Where will this leave EditGrid? We’ll continue to stay our course — becoming the best online spreadsheet around while being inter-operable with other great applications on the web and extensible by the world’s developers. We do not fear competition because EditGrid grows better with it.
Salute to iRows (2006 - 2006). Best of luck to Itai and Yoah.
P.S. If you used to be an iRows user, you can switch to EditGrid by exporting your iRows spreadsheets into .xls format and then uploading them into your EditGrid account. Unfortunately the charts on iRows aren’t preserved in the exporting step.
November 23rd, 2006 at 12:22 am
Hello,
yesterday i sent a spreadsheet from school to my G. Mail account and at home i wanted to open it and noticed G. Spreadsheets. I opened it but it was very slow and i missed some features. So i looked for an alternative and found EditGrid and immediately it was great. I imported all my Spreadsheets and began to invite my friends and classmates to work together on a spreadsheet. Later we noticed the chat function. Very nice! It was a great feeling!
I think you already have the best spreadsheet service on the web and as developer i know which work is in such a project. The function to let the public work on spreadsheets is also very great, not everyone wants to create an account. Although it is beta software, i only noticed some bugs in the chat (X has entered is sometimes shown twice or it isn’t shown that someone has left, nothing important).
But i am missing one little feature (maybe i only didn’t notice it): The feature to merge cells horizontally or even vertically.
Your service is the shit
Greets (and sorry for my “not-so-good” english)