3 ms·

Gasoline is the world standard for fueling vehicles, but we know it's not the best option, just the incumbent. Something being the standard doesn't make it the

Gasoline is the world standard for fueling vehicles, but we know it's not the best option, just the incumbent. Something being the standard doesn't make it the best, and perhaps if people innovated over Excel, it could be better. For what it's worth, I just moved a dataset out of Excel in to a pg database because what we were asking of it was just a hair more than a spreadsheet should be used for. It is great for collecting and viewing data, but as soon as the first complex filter came in, it fell apart. Something that was doable but challenging for me as a tech guy was not possible for my user, a parent. But a data grid with some simple filters and an export will get the job done, and thanks to tools like postgrest (not just postgres) and a React data grid, I was able to make something infinitely more usable than just a spreadsheet. We can all agree, Teams is awful.

vimacs2 5y ago
Well I would argue that gasoline is in fact still the "best" option if by "best" you mean the fuel source that balances energy density, ease of storage, and combustibility. Yes, it is environmentally unfriendly but so is the very notion of billions of personal vehicles to begin with, even if they were fully electric (which we are several decades from plausibly achieving). At the end of the day, Excel is spreadsheet software. This is a class of product that is very old and there are few major innovations really left, which is also why Excel remains the leader. When you have a technology that has matured to such an extent, you are now chasing the margins in terms of improvement and that is where the largest and most well funded companies hold the advantage. However the next step beyond a simple spreadsheet, the desktop database is still a sector that is quite nascent, especially in terms of products catered towards lay people. As you mentioned, currently databases are not particularly user friendly to the non-technical crowd but products like Notion are making such things more accessible. That is the area where I can envision something emerging that makes Excel or the very notion of spreadsheet software itself obsolete.

vimacs2 5y ago

Well I would argue that gasoline is in fact still the "best" option if by "best" you mean the fuel source that balances energy density, ease of storage, and combustibility. Yes, it is environmentally unfriendly but so is the very notion of billions of personal vehicles to begin with, even if they were fully electric (which we are several decades from plausibly achieving). At the end of the day, Excel is spreadsheet software. This is a class of product that is very old and there are few major innovations really left, which is also why Excel remains the leader. When you have a technology that has matured to such an extent, you are now chasing the margins in terms of improvement and that is where the largest and most well funded companies hold the advantage. However the next step beyond a simple spreadsheet, the desktop database is still a sector that is quite nascent, especially in terms of products catered towards lay people. As you mentioned, currently databases are not particularly user friendly to the non-technical crowd but products like Notion are making such things more accessible. That is the area where I can envision something emerging that makes Excel or the very notion of spreadsheet software itself obsolete.