[markoutso]

I have been reading HN for more than 3 years. It is like an addiction. I have never felt smart enough to comment something but honestly, this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read.

The writer is just rambling on irrelevant stuff while trying to be smart and promote himself and his company.

It's not even good marketing.

[noddingham]

Agreed. I'm not sure exactly what I read, but I couldn't piece together a single coherent line of thought as we jumped from sketchy individual developers to requirements gathering, something about UX, valleys, zombies, Salesforce as a CRM (except it can do anything really 'cause it's a platform), to the closing statement about perhaps not building the application you thought you needed. And what did it all have to do with spreadsheets, or building a better one?

[jimnotgym]

Agreed this article is lacking a real thread.

Re spreadsheets, I am one of those dreaded 'advanced Excel' people and some of the comments i hear about spreadsheet limitations are a bit like saying 'this chisel is a rubbish hammer'. Our main use is to take small amounts of data from our ERP and browse/sum/subtotal it in some way for adhoc analysis or sharing, or keep the record of some minor detail over time. I have seen thousands of lower skilled users use spreadsheets in this way and there is no better tool. Indeed accountants often run much more complex stuff, but tend to be very dilligent with their inputs and versioning and have little trouble. As soon as you have concurrent users a spreadsheet becomes a bad database substitute.

[wott]

> this is the worst piece of literature I have ever read.

The first line says it is a transcript from a talk, so you shouldn't expect literature.

[mmonihan]

OP. Thank you. I spit out my soda laughing reading this.

[pweissbrod]

Nailed it. I started out surprised he would charge 3k for making some cheap lotus notes crud thing he wrote in 4 hours and couldnot deploy in heroku in 8? Then there was this free associating on a bunch of unrelated concepts topped off with some kind of general axiom.

Nice work getting 3k for that kind of project, you're a better business man than me. If someone like that came my way I would direct them to Google forms or spreadsheet for free.