What goes through your mind when you load up a spreadsheet these days? What advice do you have for developers trying to come up with the next killer app? We need both general-purpose and specific tools. This is how Steve Jobs thought about a lot of things—computers should be able to figure out things for you, rather than providing you with a general-purpose tool that you could figure out how to use on your own.
But by restricting what apps can do, and how they coordinate, they are slowly stripping [the general-purpose idea] away. How does the current euphoria rate? Is there a bubble? Speculation is always there, with intermittent reinforcement. The things people say about the future sometimes turn out to be right, but the timing is wrong.
In an interview [ in ], Nikola Tesla said something about a pocket computer that basically described FaceTime or Skype on a smartphone. Eventually, we got to it. I also love the story of Helen Greiner. She went on to co-found iRobot, whose products really can disarm bombs. I lucked out by being in the right place in the right time. People bet on this, and some succeed.
What ideas may sound crazy now but will someday become commonplace? Right now, we have people who are moving around when they work. A desktop computer is not appropriate for them. Doctors, nurses, boiler repairmen… those people are not computerized in many ways.
The smartphone and tablet are now light enough and powerful enough to replace paper. Spreadsheets are designed for heavy analysis. And so the spreadsheet comes to the rescue of the desktop computer, once again.
So is there an equivalent to the spreadsheet that will someday revolutionize the mobile world? What types of tools do we need on a mobile device? Entering lots of data into a spreadsheet is not it. One of the most interesting ways to input data on the mobile is the camera. That is an area of interest. Clever people, like those who first figured out how to use spreadsheets for their business, are going to look at the capabilities of these devices and come up with new services.
A lot of it is trial and error. The spreadsheet happened to be the right program, on the right hardware, at the right time. By providing your email, you agree to the Quartz Privacy Policy. Skip to navigation Skip to content. Discover Membership. Editions Quartz. This rapid growth led to a shakeout in the spreadsheet segment of the personal computer software industry. A Lotus spokeperson indicated at that time that " and Symphony are much better products so Visicalc is no longer necessary.
The next milestone was the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Excel was originally written for the K Apple Macintosh in Excel was one of the first spreadsheets to use a graphical interface with pull down menus and a point and click capability using a mouse pointing device.
The Excel spreadsheet with a graphical user interface was easier for most people to use than the command line interface of PC-DOS spreadsheet products. There is some controversy about whether a graphical version of Microsoft Excel was released in a DOS version. Microsoft documents show the launch of Excel 2. When Microsoft launched the Windows operating system in , Excel was one of the first application products released for it. When Windows finally gained wide acceptance with Version 3.
For nearly 3 years, Excel remained the only Windows spreadsheet program and it has only received competition from other spreadsheet products since the summer of By the late s many companies had introduced spreadsheet products.
Spreadsheet products and the spreadsheet software industry were maturing. Microsoft and Bill Gates had joined the fray with the innovative Excel spreadsheet. Lotus had acquired Software Arts and the rights to VisiCalc. The spreadsheet entrepreneurs were moving on In January of , Lotus Development filed suit against Paperback Software and separately against Mosaic Software claiming they had infinged on the Lotus spreadsheet software. In a related matter, Software Arts, the developerof the original VisiCalc spreadsheet software filed a separate action against Lotus claiming that Lotus was an infringement of VisiCalc.
Briefly, Lotus won the legal battles, but lost the "market share war" to Microsoft. According to Russo and Nafziger "The Court granted Lotus' motion dismissing the Software Arts' action and confirming that Lotus had acquired all rights, including all claims, as part of the earlier transaction.
Twin was designed to work like Lotus' and advertising proclaimed it "offers you so much more, for so muchless. Their visual displays were not however identical to or to each other. The Court ruled that "[t]his particular expression of a menu structure is not essential to theelectronic spreadsheet idea, nor does it merge with the somewhat less abstract idea of a menu structure for an electronic spreadsheet Paperback Software Int'l, F.
Dan has VisiCalc at his site. Bob Frankston is "pursuing a number of projects According to a Red Herring Profile , Mitch Kapor "gradually traded in his position as an entrepreneur searching for the next big technology idea for the long-term advisory role of angel investor".
Mitch's web site is Kapor Enterprises, Inc. Frontline Systems Inc. A solver add-in can be used for both equation-solving often called goalseeking and for constrained optimization using linear programming, nonlinear programming, and integer programming methods. Simply consider how Musk, Zuckerberg, Page, and Bezos have all become as common as celebrity names in the household. But I want to talk about Daniel Bricklin and Doug Klunder , or the piece of software that despite being invented over 30 years ago, lives on hundreds of millions of machines.
I want to talk about a tool that spurred entirely new industries and still remains the biggest competitor to many new-age companies. Just in terms of sheer market penetration, Microsoft believes that 1 in 5 adults use Excel. And despite recent advances by competitors like Google sheets , it is estimated that there may still be 1. And despite the numerous updates and creation of now functions , the concepts behind Excel and even some of the original code still remain.
More on this later. And if we accept the fundamental nature of spreadsheets in that they are indeed programs, Excel remains the most popular software development environment in the world. Perhaps most principally, people can trust that they can use the program completely out of the box. No dependencies, no boilerplate; it just works. Albeit a bit dramatic, Microsoft Excel fundamentally changed the way people run their lives and their businesses. Personally, I do everything in spreadsheets.
I track my life ranging from how often I exercise to how often I floss , I create lists, I project my finances, and much more. The beauty of spreadsheets are in the fundamentals, which is exactly why the tool can be translated into dozens of practical uses. At its core, Excel did and still does something very fundamental. But they are the ones building such things at scale, just as Excel took the concept of the spreadsheet and delivered it to the world. Simply consider the swath of job titles that have emerged in business analytics, just like the one I spent the greater part of in.
Entire companies are completely built off of the back of Excel. They love it. For some of the simpler solutions it provides, there are certainly parallels.
Consider not only the number of explicit businesses that were built off of Excel, but also the sheer amount of business intelligence functioning off of the tooling. All the dashboards. All the financial decisions. All the forecasting. If it was a decision between keeping Excel or, literally, every other app - would keep Excel pic. As much as I love the product have I told you that I love Excel? If we go back to the invention of Excel 34 years ago , so much has changed in the way people communicate and work.
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