But that's just path dependency. If Excel didn't exist, everything would run on something or somethings else. And it's not clear whether this timeline is better or worse than the average timeline in that respect.

I'd need a pretty strong argument to believe the world would be better absent spreadsheet programs.

My starting point would be that in their absence, a lot of problems wouldn't have been solved with computers, for want of programmers.

Without a doubt, if Excel didn't exist, someone would have created it.

It's the lowest-barrier programmable logic, a coordinate-system where arithmetic can be applied to contents of any given coordinates.

And it likely would have grown into the same exact mess as Excel, with continuous expansion of the arithmetic part, as people kept reaching the limits of it but wouldn't go back and recreate everything in a DB...

I'm told there were better spreadsheet software back in the day, but that Excel basically won accounting/finance by allowing itself to be shareware (i.e. effectively free), in a similar way to how Microsoft has at times turned a blind eye to piracy of its other produce (e.g. Windows).

Not really. Once Windows came in, Excel was pretty much the best game in town. Lotus didn't really do a great job on Windows. There were some attempts at more integrated office suites but they didn't really take off. There were also some attempts at different spreadsheet models but people were probably too used to essentially the original Visicalc model. Not sure that Excel was anymore effectively shareware than any of its competitors.

piracy in the school playground in the 90s did much to cement the use of MSFT Office at home

Not so much.. I mean if Word Perfect and Lotus 123 had a merger, then they would still be competitive as neither was really better than the MS Office counterparts, but as a combo they would have had more entrenchment to work from.

IBM buying Lotus and not Word Perfect was probably a mistake, had they really wanted to take it seriously... but they seemed more interested in Lotus Notes (think Outlook+Access in a self-hosted cloud environment), it was imho nasty af.

> Excel is a highly used tool possibly the most used tool and enables many users who do not consider themselves programmers to be productive with their PCs.

What frustrates me the most about this is I've seen some insane excel wizardry from the accounting department at various jobs over the years that is effectively programming, and that if these people had put just as much effort into learning Python & using a database, they'd be better off and might actually make good developers. In my view, Excel ends up becoming sort of an artificial barrier to departments outside of IT being able to make business software.

Now let's talk about MS Access!

Also a good point- but there is no python runtime on accounting and PMs computers. And it’s also a huge mess to try and support. Imagine some python code from 10 years ago, then juggling the versions, then god forbid any module dependencies. It’s simply not portable. Meanwhile the VBA written in 2000 is still working all contained in an excel Workbook.