Farewell Xcelsius/BOB Dashboards/Crystal Dashboards

It started of simply enough – a Flash front-end for Excel. The clever bit was the interaction between the spreadsheet and the widgets. Great for budgeting and what-if analysis.

Then some server-side stuff was added, so the licensing became complicated. It seemed to change slightly with every release. Sometimes it appeared that only the name had changed.

The runtime licensing was expensive so it soon lost sales to more sensibly licensed products.

Then it gained a couple of new names – Crystal Dashboard and SAP Dashboards.

The licensing became simpler just in time for Adobe to announce they would be dropping Flash.

SAP announced end of support some time next year.

Then, without warning, it disappeared from the price list.

You can still buy it as part of the server products, but standalone, it is no more.

Who killed Xcelsius? Marketing? Licensing? Adobe? SAP’s lack of interest? Probably a combination of all 4. It’s sad that with a little work, it could have been converted to work without Flash by just using HTML 5, but SAP were more interested in the shiny new Lumira (also end of life!).

It’s time that I finally spent some time on that demo server of Metabase Dashboards.