Then it goes into the risk that comes from looking at everything in a company as numbers, attractive now that you have the spreadsheet to manipulate numbers easily, but there are many things that can’t adequately be represented as a spreadsheet without losing valuable information in the process. Finally, AI agents now make it tempting to think of everything in a business as a collection of potentially automatable tasks, which similarly risks losing what makes companies special.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
It’s a keyword search away. There are many, and they love Excel. How did you not find them?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Modeling_World_Cup
https://www.reddit.com/r/excel/comments/15r53rc/why_i_unapol...
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/spilled-range-ope...
There is no other planning tool in the software industry that can answer “what if I changed that” as seamlessly as excel.
Planning is not about its absolute numbers but about its sensitivity to inputs and assumptions.
A single spreadsheet used locally is probably the best imaginable tool for answering "what if I changed that."
That same sheet shared across an organization suddenly becomes a game of "what caused that change."
Some random sheets I've used, neither made by me nor about business:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m08haqvTiXKIh4c7y4uM...
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo_-HebVr_9PruE94LgT...
"This will be genuinely extraordinary for what organizations, particularly the best organizations, can achieve. But if each previous ideology of the corporation illuminated something real about its character and potential, each also, in the fullness of time, deformed it. The financial ideology was blind to what could not be quantified; and the AI ideology, I suspect, will be blind to what cannot be made legible as a workflow."
Really, spreadsheets are fine, they probably hit that sweet spot for easy to get something together and deep enough to express complex needs. But I have to admit, now that I have better tools I don't enjoy doing work in them anymore.
The reactive programming aspect is genuinely good; I wish my business logic could be expressed declaritively and the system just reacted automatically.
I also find it fascinating to consider the looks-like-a-spreadsheet-but-statically-typed-and-scoped world (airtable is a step in this direction, for example).
I’ve been thinking about how AI will change the way companies are organized. It’s hard to believe that today’s corporation is the ultimate organizational form, there’s just too much stupidity on display.
How will companies compete in the future when they’re all just an AI wrapper?
who doesn't love spreadsheets? the average corporate employee holds a death grip on google sheets even if you spend $1m on software that theoretically should keep them out of it.
i've seen countless instances across engineering/data, product, marketing, and recruiting where data is smuggled out of an HRIS/ATS/CRM/ERP to create static structure, improved personal tracking, note-taking, data analysis, realtime team collaboration, etc. all wrapped up in a mini database.
I have some reason to believe my team was the first within Apple SQA to lean heavily into that, but I’d love to hear of earlier examples.