What lots of people fail to understand is this: little work-saving apps seems to work magically (for the users) because a lot of the logic, especially how to handle thorny edge cases which nobody considered before, is left in the brain of the user himself. If I designed an app where a particular use case would be handled by "write down the caller's number on a post-it note and then ask George from accounting over a coffee cup at the cafeteria" I would face the firing squad. But ironically enough this is how the "little spreadsheet my cousin helped me with over the weekend" handles this case, and all other unanticipated cases, and this is great because it's not a 3-tier sql dB driven app. (An app that handles everything else, though, and has to meet also regulatory requirements including SOX).