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"The slower adaptation to new processes and ideas is a good thing as it means that these new processes are going to be specced correctly and hopefully tested to

"The slower adaptation to new processes and ideas is a good thing as it means that these new processes are going to be specced correctly and hopefully tested to some degree" I disagree. Most businesses need more agility and experimentation, not less. There is a huge spectrum of businesses. It would be ridiculous to say to a startup that you need to experiment less and put safeguards to a place, so that you don't make huge losses of revenue. There are lot of traditional businesses in which downside can be guarded easily (retail, many sales organizations) but finding better ways to run the machine can give significant edge. Most ERPs and Excel-sheet apps don't model automatic stock trading, and don't move billions of dollars without safeguards in place. Rather, they model and assist in existing human processes and the sad fact is that the ERP software is the stumbling point for rapid experimentation. That is why Excel is so popular.

d4nt 14y ago
I don't see any reason why you can't have the agility of Excel with a few of the nice tools that modern IDEs have to make it easier to debug or secure a spreadsheet "app". Excel actually has a lot of features for preventing issues such as formula debugging, input validation and named ranges that make formulas more readable, but the UI is terrible and it's not very discoverable. The problem with Excel seems to be primarily that the MS desktop monopoly made it very hard for people to market better UIs for the "quick financial model" use case. The only way around that was either in B2B sales (where the economics forced you into building big ERP systems where management locked down the processes) or over the web, where we've had to wait for browser technology to reach a sufficient level of power before such a system could be built. I think since IE9, we're now at that point. It wouldn't surprise me if we now start to see a multitude of apps chip away at Excel's dominance in each of its use cases (like trello is doing for the 'lists of stuff' use case).
- georgewfraser 14y ago
  We (Fivetran) are doing exactly this, bridging the gap between spreadsheets and coding and making real algorithms accessible to non-programmers. The primary thing that makes spreadsheets more approachable is the live-updating, and this feature can be separated from the grid-of-cells model with a cleverly designed language. We'll be starting a private beta in the next few weeks, stay tuned.
  - ChrisNews 14y ago
    This sounds interesting. Would be interested in the user interface of how this turns out.
arethuza 14y ago
"they model and assist in existing human processes" Isn't that the point though - the "RP" in "ERP" is "Resource Planning" so they really are mainly focused on process oriented manufacturing or services. If you don't need the "RP" bit of an ERP then aren't you really just left with a financials package?

d4nt 14y ago

I don't see any reason why you can't have the agility of Excel with a few of the nice tools that modern IDEs have to make it easier to debug or secure a spreadsheet "app". Excel actually has a lot of features for preventing issues such as formula debugging, input validation and named ranges that make formulas more readable, but the UI is terrible and it's not very discoverable. The problem with Excel seems to be primarily that the MS desktop monopoly made it very hard for people to market better UIs for the "quick financial model" use case. The only way around that was either in B2B sales (where the economics forced you into building big ERP systems where management locked down the processes) or over the web, where we've had to wait for browser technology to reach a sufficient level of power before such a system could be built. I think since IE9, we're now at that point. It wouldn't surprise me if we now start to see a multitude of apps chip away at Excel's dominance in each of its use cases (like trello is doing for the 'lists of stuff' use case).

georgewfraser 14y ago
We (Fivetran) are doing exactly this, bridging the gap between spreadsheets and coding and making real algorithms accessible to non-programmers. The primary thing that makes spreadsheets more approachable is the live-updating, and this feature can be separated from the grid-of-cells model with a cleverly designed language. We'll be starting a private beta in the next few weeks, stay tuned.
- ChrisNews 14y ago
  This sounds interesting. Would be interested in the user interface of how this turns out.

arethuza 14y ago

"they model and assist in existing human processes" Isn't that the point though - the "RP" in "ERP" is "Resource Planning" so they really are mainly focused on process oriented manufacturing or services. If you don't need the "RP" bit of an ERP then aren't you really just left with a financials package?