This looks really good. Haven't read in full yet, but I was hoping to see him credit Ben Evans's "Office, messaging and verbs" (2015): "In effect, every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet. The floor is a worksheet and the building is an Excel file, with thousands of cells each containing a single person."
I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]
This has interesting speculation on the future business impact of AI, extrapolated from Excel:
"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."
Hence the title and its hearkening back to seeing like a state - I would guess one of the author's related views is that a rigid, high-modern codification scheme will always miss the magic stuff that fills in the cracks. And you can't go without that without eventual unforeseeable consequences. It's a techne versus metis distinction I think
Absolutely. And the data and code being stored all in one file makes it exceptionally nimble for the planning phase. You can generally count on any stakeholder in your org being able to handle it.
Budget planning, presumably. How much you are going to spend and on what, and what you need to charge for your products to break even or meet a profit goal.
Maybe you’re talking to the wrong people?
Management consultants spontaneously express their love for excel without being prompted. I’ve even seen it at parties.
They are also very good at it. Coders suck at using excel. Honorable mention for the finance folks who know both excel and vba because they deal with both sides.
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47579407
[1] https://www.inkandswitch.com/ambsheets/notebook/
[0] https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/spilled-range-ope...
"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."
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."
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.