[lhh]

I agree that spreadsheets are still extremely useful, and surprisingly difficult to improve upon. Maybe it's because spreadsheets combine a bunch of the primitives used to build many types of applications - tabular data, persistent data, operations on that data (CRUD, per the article), trivial to inspect the data, and can make various views on the data.

It seems to me that quite a few successful software companies boil down to a spreadsheet with enforced structure to the data and codified operations performed on the data specific to the problem domain. CRMs, accounting systems, project management systems, and ordering & inventory management systems are some examples.

Our product focused on financial projection & reporting (https://www.modeloptic.com/) is another example: Excel-like functionality at the core, and since we've constrained the domain and know how different pieces of data relate to each other, we can automate away a lot of the manual labor that'd be needed in completely free-form Excel.

[InflexHQ]

I’ve also seen that there’s a whole sub industry of companies that build a platform on top of a spreadsheet by assuming a certain structure of the data. Aside from myself, Julia’s Pluto.jl, ObservableHQ, and a few researchers, there aren’t many trying to invent a new spreadsheet replacement with a fundamentally different conceptual model.