People might be seeing this through slightly rose-tinted glasses.

Yes, you could use Excel 95 by just double-clicking on an icon.

However, not only did you have to buy and install the software, which back in the day often meant going to an actual brick-and-mortar store to purchase a shrink-wrapped box labelled "Office 95", but it even required buying a specific type of computer with a specific operating system first.

In this specific case, that doesn't even take into account Microsoft's shady tactics of strong-arming vendors and OEMs into exclusively shipping Microsoft software with their products.

So, arguably, the barrier to entry still was a lot higher than with even the most obnoxious growth hacking tactics we see in many SaaS products today.

That said, I absolutely love the way Excalidraw are "onboarding" users.

It's just worth remembering that not everything went downhill with SaaS products (in fact, quite the opposite) and not everything was better "back in the day".

Shrink-wrapped software back then weren't cheap too, costing hundreds if not thousands of dollars per copy.

Dear god - anyone here have to setup licensing servers for high-end 3D software from the past, like Softimage or Alias|Wavefront - those were a bitch, and if you lost connection to the licensing server, you couldnt run the program.

Excalidraw is akin to dia, but on the web. Also, it's more targeted and polished it seems, and that's nice.