Seeing like a spreadsheet
davidoks.blog
Seeing like a spreadsheet
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#2I really feel for Dan Bricklin. He should have been richly rewarded for his innovation.
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#3This 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."
https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#4Maybe 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.
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#5This 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." https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/5/21/office-mes...
"Office, messaging and verbs" was excellent, thanks for the recommendation.
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#6This 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."
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#7I wrote this, hope people enjoy it!
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#8Maybe 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.
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#9This 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…
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
Re: Seeing like a spreadsheet
#10Excel (e spreadsheets) is the best quantitative planning piece of software.
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.