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 problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains.

Packy McCormick • Excel Never Dies

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Excel Never Dies

Packy McCormick notboring.co

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.

Benjamin Rollert • Excel Never Dies

Excel combines the power of a programming language, the immediate usability of consumer software, and the skill progression of a video game with the flexibility to adapt to nearly infinite use cases. That’s a combination no other software offers, and it’s why Excel has been able to survive and thrive while millions of other applications have come a... See more

Benjamin Rollert • Excel Never Dies

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

Benedict Evans • Unbundling AI

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.

Benjamin Rollert • Excel Never Dies

We’ve spent the last few decades getting to the point that we can now give everyone on earth a cheap, reliable, easy-to-use pocket computer with access to a global information network. But so far, though over 4bn people have one of these things, we’ve only just scratched the surface of what we can do with them. There’s an old saying that the first ... See more

Benedict Evans • What comes after smartphones? — Benedict Evans

Microsoft & Google adding generative AI into office apps is a classic pattern of incumbents making the new thing a feature. But the new thing generally also enables completely new ways to solve the problem. ‘Easier spreadsheets’ is less important than ‘why is that a spreadsheet?’

Benedict Evans

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If there is a core product design lesson to learn from Excel, it’s that combining usability with flexibility is both incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding.