[doctorpangloss]

> My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows.

Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail.

Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed.

As an aside, an alternative interpretation would be that Excel workflows are more intellectually stimulating, so as a side effect they come up with better models. So even if your software had a superior UX for the task at hand, the objective of making money is better served by people using their brains harder generally.

After all, a lot of people practice violin and play chess because it feels good, and then those people make a bajillion dollars on the stock market. Consider that if Excel even remotely reenacts the patterns of those activities, which is almost certainly does, it makes money in ways besides calculating numbers in a user-accessible way.

[mruts]

I think your last paragraph is really spot on. Being an expert at excel makes you feel like a wizard, just like how emacs or vi or the bloomberg terminal makes you feel.

Our software didn’t have that feeling, it didn’t make you feel powerful in the same way that excel does (I lobbied hard for us to make a desktop app, no one likes how web apps feel. But nobody listened)