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Eons ago, I worked for Lotus Software (way before they belonged to IBM) on an exiting new product - their flagship Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet product, in those days the preeminent spreadsheet offering in the world, ported to the IBM mainframe. I travelled around Europe as we sold this to large corporations who wanted the power of the spreadsheet, but multipled by a gazillion times and made multi-user. Almost every customer was so receptive and excited, it was a fun and job and easy sell. But later, we learnt that those customers were in fact the early adopters, and Lotus never did manage to cross the chasm with that product. Later Microsoft produced Excel and..well the rest is history. My conclusion: the world doesn't need a better spreadsheet. Existing spreadsheet technologies are good enough for the hokey, half-baked things that people like to build with them. |
It's from another digital software age and from experience, hard not to think of the applications created with it as archaic monstrosities, yet there was something there.
In many ways it was what the OP is talking about: a networked formbuilder that allowed for people with technical skills roughly equivalent to that of an Excel superstar to build actual line of business apps.
For those same reasons, it had lots of issues. Often a spreadsheet is the right choice, maybe not when it gets to be 200MB and corrupts itself because multiple people are accessing the same file across the network.
Notes apps worked until they didn't, but are still kind of fascinating in their awfulness.