Just need to figure out where the tradeoffs are and I think Excel made a pretty good one. I think Excel shouldn't be used for recurring jobs but for the one off it can't be beat.
It was obviously a really crude approach, but it worked... i've worked at a lot of places with more mature and sophisticated approaches to ad-hoc reporting requests but they were all way more of a headache in terms of IT workload.
Of course, it didn't hurt that one of the VPs quickly became a SQL select-statement guru within the exec team.
What does fronting a database with a web service buy you? Rate throttling? Load balancing? Metering?
Why isn't there a JBDC proxy server thingie that does those things for straight JDBC?
You can leave notes in cells as documentation. I also have an instructions tab in just about every model I have that walks the user through the process. The hidden formula thing can also be partially overcome by using certain colored cells to denote formulas, making the user aware that there are formulas.
If you're really smart about it, Excel is one of the most remarkable tools for analysis ever devised. The problem is virtually everyone who is smart about it can use different better tools that are more suited to their purpose.
More than "replicate", I think the problem is no one else -- and, with enough time and complexity, not even the originator -- can maintain it, which results in Excel often being a vehicle for low-initiation-cost and rapidly-rising-maintenance-cost tools (which, in effect, often end up as straightjackets as no one wants to bear the cost of starting over, or the cost of updating, so business processes end up getting constrained by the tool rather than the tool adapting to processes.)
I proposed this idea once during a job interview; data analysts were using Excel to model data for providing short term financing. I proposed a web-based system that allowed users to share formulas over large datasets; datasets large enough that you wouldn't materialize them in spreadsheets (dropping the spreadsheet metaphor mentioned above).
Yeah, that.
It's intensely powerful (my boss can do spectacular things with pivot tables and teaches all the business people to do this as a means to doing their own analysis of our reports) but the high-power features have a positively nasty UI compared to the corresponding SQL query.
I'd love to see an Excel designed-from-scratch that scratches the same itches of approachability and user-friendliness but with an awareness of Excel's failings and without obsessing over the spreadsheet metaphor. Something in-between Excel and Access.