The world needs a better spreadsheet • Hacker News Board

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#11

Post by chowes » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps.

The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the features they provide. Chat, ticket queues, automation, etc. Business users also don't want to be architects - a turnkey solution that solves 80% of their use case is better than a blank slate that they have to start thinking about schemas, relationships, etc. The old saying "nobody ever got fired choosing IBM" can now just as easily be applied to VP of Sales picking Salesforce.

That being said, there ARE tools to do this: Quickbase (enterprise) and Airtable come to mind. I'm curious if the author has looked into using one as their base instead of Google Forms/Sheets.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#12

Post by markoutso » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:14 PM UTC

I have been reading HN for more than 3 years. It is like an addiction. I have never felt smart enough to comment something but honestly, this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read.

The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company.

It's not even good marketing.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#13

Post by michaelbuckbee » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:15 PM UTC

beachy wrote: post #3

Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every custo…

I like that you're bringing up Lotus, but I was thinking of a different product: Notes.

It's from another digital software age and from experience, hard not to think of the applications created with it as archaic monstrosities, yet there was something there.

In many ways it was what the OP is talking about: a networked formbuilder that allowed for people with technical skills roughly equivalent to that of an Excel superstar to build actual line of business apps.

For those same reasons, it had lots of issues. Often a spreadsheet is the right choice, maybe not when it gets to be 200MB and corrupts itself because multiple people are accessing the same file across the network.

Notes apps worked until they didn't, but are still kind of fascinating in their awfulness.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#14

Post by mmonihan » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:15 PM UTC

canadian_voter wrote: post #8

Perhaps, In the end, the best piece of software is the one you never had to build in the first place. -- The Article Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble? -- SICP I think the real uncanny valley here lies in maintaining software, not designing it. Business needs change over time and software must adapt. I th…

OP. This is a great point. The activation cost for you to respond to support calls is probably more than the company would be willing to pay you. Which is why SaaS businesses with support teams that benefit from scale are the de facto model for these businesses.

I think there's a version of something like Microsoft Access that can take away a lot of support requests.

I get a ton of requests related to lists of collections within the app, which could be maintained by the users themselves.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#15

Post by beachy » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:17 PM UTC

Chyzwar wrote: post #9

beachy wrote: post #3

Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every custo…

I thing that good spreadsheet application with seamless integration with web and with collaboration tooling would be interesting. Decent scripting with something Julia and some kind of build in Jupyter notebook would be exciting to use. Integrated version control where each document lives in own repo that you can shared as just link shpreadsheet:://user.myNewspreadsheet Excel is relict of old ages: slow, bug ridden,…

I think of spreadsheets as like q-tips. Apparently the one thing that the manufacturers of q-tips tell you not to do is to stick them in your orifices. Yet the number one actual use of q-tips is people cleaning gunk from their ears.

People build the most insane, unmaintainable, insecure messes using spreadsheets - because they can.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#16

Post by mmonihan » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:24 PM UTC

chowes wrote: post #11

I agree with this in premise, and had a very similar idea with a friend earlier this year - that many of the business apps out there are really just CRUD apps. The main piece of feedback that we got when pitching this idea was that you're going to end up as a master-of-none. Yes, we could give you the tools to set up Customer, Ticket, etc. objects. But in order to win over Zendesk, you're going to need all of the fea…

OP. This is an idea I've been going back and forth on for a while.

I have checked out Quickbase, Airtable, Ragic, etc.

What I've noticed is that I always want the ability to go to code when I need to. My clients are all on Rails apps today, and I'm happy with rails as a dev solution. And, I don't want to give up that flexibility.

However, there are use cases where I want to just use a form builder UI to manage a data model. I've been using http://form.io for that recently. You use a form builder to generate a UI and an API simultaneously and submissions are stored in Mongo. And, I can build the app as I want using their API.

I think that paradigm is the future, it just needs more refinement.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#17

Post by niftich » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:28 PM UTC

Spreadsheets are the poor man's data processing pipeline; they ship with a wealth of numeric and data munging functions and give you an easy-to-understand visual representation of your datastore. You can use them to crunch numbers and graph, but also to implement fairly complex business logic, and they accomplish this within the confines of an application you probably have already bought anyway. They're the epitome of the entrepreneurial spirit you need to survive adversity in the SMB space.

Spreadsheets don't succeed outside of pure numerical calculations because they're that good, they succeed because they're versatile and ubiquitous, and everyone already has Excel or Google Sheets. If everyone already had, say, Sharepoint, or even some drag-and-drop no-cost rapid application generator that requires zero sysadmin skills to run, that would be the new baseline.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#18

Post by infinite8s » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:29 PM UTC

Avshalom wrote: post #7

While I'm not entirely sure if "the world needs a better spreadsheet" is a stand in for "accessible prototyping tools" it's worth noting that things like Quantrix Modeler and DADiSP are the better spreadsheets it's just that no one uses them because Excel (and by extension Excel work-alikes) have path dependency on their side.

And those products are thousands of dollars a year while Excel comes bundled with every mass market computer.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#19

Post by mmonihan » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:32 PM UTC

markoutso wrote: post #12

I have been reading HN for more than 3 years. It is like an addiction. I have never felt smart enough to comment something but honestly, this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read. The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company. It's not even good marketing.

OP. Thank you. I spit out my soda laughing reading this.

Re: The world needs a better spreadsheet

#20

Post by Avshalom » Fri, Jan 20, 2017, 9:33 PM UTC

infinite8s wrote: post #18

Avshalom wrote: post #7

While I'm not entirely sure if "the world needs a better spreadsheet" is a stand in for "accessible prototyping tools" it's worth noting that things like Quantrix Modeler and DADiSP are the better spreadsheets it's just that no one uses them because Excel (and by extension Excel work-alikes) have path dependency on their side.

And those products are thousands of dollars a year while Excel comes bundled with every mass market computer.

Yeah, fair enough, that too.

I happen to think "paying for good tools" is a good thing but as a student/stockboy: A thousand dollars is a fucking lot of dollars, especially if your business is still running on debt.