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Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

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Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#81

Post by tamana »

eterm wrote: post #38
elcapitan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's actually an interesting gap between 'building some model in Excel' and 'moving on into a programming model where code and data are separated'. Like generating model code in some normal programming language from a spreadsheet.

Does VBA fill that gap? I once worked on a system where one of the more important parts of the business was a system of VBA modules in an access file. One of my more important contributions as a fresh graduate entering the workplace was to get people to copy the file from the network share to a local drive before running. Run-times went from "leave overnight" to ~15 minutes.

Right, but why VBA? Because VBA is the only language with first class support in Excel, not because VBA is good at all. If not fon its "privilege", you'd use something like Python or JavaScript (yah it sucks, but not as bad a VB) or a purpose-built sane language, not something Joel Spolsky dashed off a spec for one Tuesday afternoon.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#82

Post by tamana »

scholia wrote: post #65
qihqi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shittiest aspect of Office is the price.

Let's say someone who earns $50,000 a year uses Office for 5 hours a day while making a living. It's also a purchased copy so it lasts at least 6 years. What's that worth? How does it compare with the cost of, say, one Starbucks a day? If you employ somebody on that salary for 6 years (so add extra employment costs including taxes, insurance, office space and perks), what percentage do you save by not paying Office's…

Vim, for example, makes me 10$/yr at least, but doesn't cost anywhere near that. It's better prices than Office.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#83

Post by cm2187 »

thedevil wrote: post #48
CyberDildonics wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that?

It was very well made. It's easy to use and yet but also has great features and shortcuts for power users. There's lots of genius little features not available elsewhere, like grouping columns or formulas over columns or rows (e.g. sum(A:A)). I often abused it with 50mb spreadsheets (a bad practice fyi) and it could often take it. The version I used rarely crashed. For most software I use, I see lots of things that n…

Let's start a list:

Opening a csv triggers a full recalc even if your calcs are on manual. That's absurd given that csv files by definition have no formulas

Come on Microsoft. 18 years without updating the scripting abilities. Can't we have a .net version of VBA?? And NO JAVASCRIPT.

The fx button still opens a tiny old non resizable windows with a broken search feature, which is impractical if you have hundreds of UDF.

High levels of nesting in the UI making it really slow to repeat certain actions (try drawing something). I still miss Excel 2003's customizable UI.

They could provide at least a function to pull end of day FX rates.

Integration with powerpoint pretty much non existant. A huge amount of users prepare decks based on a model in Excel. The process to link them is unstable / stone age.

We should be able to transform a sheet into an excel formula, so that a non programmer can apply a complex logic to lots of data without a script.

Xlsm files get corrupted regularly when excel is running low on memory.

Adopt apple's idea of a sheet being a canvas on which you can drag tables or charts instead of having this antique model of a single grid which becomes annoying as soon as you have two tables on the same tab.

I am sure I can pull more if popular demand!

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#84

Post by [deleted] »

dahart wrote: post #21

I've just learned this lesson the hard way. I had my own terminology for it, so it's helpful and educational to learn words and phrases that others will understand and use. But absolutely, I'm exactly the type of person the article is talking about, I have experience and an amazing team, and our "improvements" have more or less failed spectacularly. We learned that design ideas that are "better" than the status quo o…

[deleted]

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#85

Post by osullivj »

iofj wrote: post #55
adrianN wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like I wouldn't want to live in a house built from LEGO, I'm somewhat wary of Excel models as the basis for investment strategies in major banks. The problem with the quick and hacky solution is that it's never replaced, because that would cost money, and the current solution "looks like it works".

However the excel solution has a lot of things going for it : 1) applications/reports built by the people designing and understanding the underlying needs and inner workings of whatever they're offering. Whilst very good programmers can match this (given enough - that's a lot - time), average programmers won't even try. 2) excel sheets require nowhere near the manpower required for your alternative. That factors into…

1) is priceless. In banks I've seen many traders build pricing and risk solutions in Excel that would take weeks or months for developers who don't understand the products and/or maths to build. In some games, time to market is everything.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#86

Post by sandworm101 »

geori wrote: post #2

MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.

Too bad Excel isn't really a standalone product. Office and windows are necessary dependencies. Given that, it is a shitty product. If they broke it out, allowed me to run it on an OS I actually want to use, away from MS's gremlins, then I certainly would buy/install/use. But as of today it comes with far too much baggage.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#87

Post by Kiro »

geori wrote: post #2

MS Office (specifically Excel) is not a shitty product. There's a reason why it has a larger monopoly with finance types Wall Street than Google does with search. Power users can quickly build powerful financial models with it.

Yeah, the MS Office comment ruined an otherwise good article.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#88

Post by osullivj »

crispyambulance wrote: post #41
adrianN wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing complex modelling in Excel is not a good idea. There is no way to do proper software engineering, so bugs are common and hard to find. For examples, see http://www.eusprig.org/horror-stories.htm

So? Many great projects start out as excel spreadsheets: someone has a problem, solves it with excel, then goes on to solve other problems with that spreadsheet. People use it and become dependent on it, but over time the thing becomes intractable. At that point in time, the functionality of the spreadsheet gets implemented by actual developers into some "engineered application." If you are suggesting to NOT start wi…

And once some devs turn it into an "engineered application" the change cycle jumps from minutes or hours to days, weeks or even months.

Re: Why Shitty Products Survive and Thrive

#90

Post by scholia »

tamana wrote: post #82
scholia wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say someone who earns $50,000 a year uses Office for 5 hours a day while making a living. It's also a purchased copy so it lasts at least 6 years. What's that worth? How does it compare with the cost of, say, one Starbucks a day? If you employ somebody on that salary for 6 years (so add extra employment costs including taxes, insurance, office space and perks), what percentage do you save by not paying Office's…

Vim, for example, makes me 10$/yr at least, but doesn't cost anywhere near that. It's better prices than Office.

Sure, but it's not a replacement for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or any of the other Office programs.

The real question is, if vim cost $100, would you pay or would you use a product you didn't like as much, that wasn't as efficient, or as productive? How much would you pay for a Supervim that earned you an extra $5k/yr?

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