[goatlover]

But why not word processors or presentation software (PowerPoint)? How about Photoshop? That's pretty big.

Edit: oh, you're not computing something so much as you're using shrink wrapped software to build documents, presentations, or manipulate images. So, not quite the same.

As for programming languages, I disagree. You don't go from only knowing say Python, PHP and Java to being able to use Haskell in a few hours. There's a substantial learning curve in being able to use a sufficiently different programming language. And no, "Hello, World" or typing in a few simple commands from a tutorial don't count.

Do you suppose the a C programmer is just going to be building a meaningful Smalltalk or Lisp program after a couple of hours? Or that a Javascript programmer is going to be whipping up C++ applications in that amount of time?

[gitonup]

I've seen orgs run on Excel spreadsheets: one electric utility I worked for described their load in one massive Excel sheet. Where I think this analogy falls apart is that so many spreadsheets come to depend on macros (which my experience did, via ODBC), which makes them a meld between 2 and 3. I've definitely written systems at level 2 -- at the same company -- that have had way more ROI than the spreadsheet based system that was previously employed, but the spreadsheet could have employed macros to do the same thing.