A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge

Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve p... See more

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today. Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone.

Spreadsheets are the long tail of datasets that don’t have their own SaaS tool yet.

An enormous percentage of the successes in the last couple decades of B2B software have come from unbundling Excel, and we suspect that many of the next couple decades’ biggest winners will be Inspired by Excel.

Going back to Excel and shifting my metaphor up a level, today ChatGPT sometimes seems more like the original PCs than like Excel (or VisiCalc). It’s a general purpose technology, there’s a command line, and some stuff that’s theoretically magic, and a few things that are extremely useful to a few people, but we don’t yet have the richness of all t... See more

Like Excel, these products are simple enough that non-technical people can use them, but flexible enough that users will create with them in ways that the product’s creators can’t anticipate.