An early spreadsheet from the 1945 Supplement to the Code Federal Regulations of the United States of America.

The End of Excel?

How Notion, Coda, and Airtable are chipping away at Microsoft's monopoly

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@takolota over 2 years ago

I think this really missed one of its own points…

“Your formulas and macros and integrations made Excel not just another file type; it was a no-code development environment, where anyone could build a new tool to aid their work.

Good luck replacing that.”

The problem with the article is it only looked at MS Excel & not everything else that MS has built next to it.

All those niche use-cases, Microsoft is in some sense pursuing any & all of them at once without even hiring a team for any of them. And they aren’t pursuing them with different spreadsheet features. They’re building up Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, Teams, Power Pages, etc.

They’re building up a low-code platform so that any organization can get 1-3 people to build anything they need, exactly how they need it. Sure, some start-ups are going to build significantly better versions of some set use-case, but adopting multiple different niche products for niche use-cases makes integrating systems/operations and maintenance/updates a nightmare. And even on really niche use-cases, if people can build APIs for it, then they can add it to the suite of connectors in Power Automate. The main benefits of Microsoft are not in Excel, they’re in the easy integration of all the tools/processes of an org without a constant need for highly specialized expertise.

Matthew Guay over 2 years ago

@takolota That is a good point on what made Excel so sticky—both the integrations with other Microsoft products, and the vast ecosystem of 3rd party integrations also built around it. And to your point, it could be that in a way Excel has gone up-market towards the more low-code platform building (similar to Access, originally) which has left the more basic traditional spreadsheet tasks open to competition from lower-end products. So if you need everything Excel and its ecosystem offer, the startup competition can't replicate that—but if you need simpler things, Excel offers more than you need and thus you can get by with a newer alternative.

@kevinirapatrick over 2 years ago

No honorable mention for Multiplan? I'm so old I remember going from VisiCalc to MS Multiplan (as we transitioned to IBM-PCs) then to Excel... skipping Lotus 1-2-3 completely. The big challenge for VisiCalc was that it ran on an Apple II+ machine that didn't have up and down keyboard arrows. It was more like playing a video game than one would like.

Matthew Guay over 2 years ago

@kevinirapatrick I really should have included—and, unfortunately, don't have first-hand experience of that time period, with Excel '95 being the first spreadsheet I used. Looks like from stats I can find that VisiCalc then Lotus 1-2-3 then Excel were the most popular, with Multiplan and many other smaller ones as alternatives to the then-leaders.

@takolota over 2 years ago

By the way, if you want an example & a project management set-up less expensive than MS Project, then you can check out this template I built that only uses standard SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, & Power Automate. So no need for additional licensing. If you have an office account with SharePoint, this is a free set-up.

https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Project-Tracker-SharePoint-and-Teams/td-p/1788102

@nikede8004 over 2 years ago

Great piece. The day where Excel has to build a feature that another company dreamed up has already happened. The biggest example is collaboration in real time: Excel (and Word and PowerPoint) retrofitted their apps to make this work. It's now good enough for many use cases. All without sacrificing the other features that users were already depending on.

Matthew Guay over 2 years ago

@nikede8004 That is a great point. Hard to imagine the entire Office Online suite existing in its present state in a world without Google Workspace.