[TheRealDunkirk]

Credit where due, spreadsheet applications were already established AND bundled into suites by the time Microsoft got around to leveraging their market position to make Office the de facto standard. But, yeah, I owe most of my career to making real web apps out of badly designed, hard to use, vile to share, yet somehow better than nothing Excel workbooks. Even with all the modern trappings, and besides specific applications like Photoshop or CATIA, you could probably still run a company on just email and Excel, because people will make Excel do whatever they need, no matter how lumbering the monster becomes.

[twoodfin]

That undersells the innovation of Excel, which started out as a Macintosh exclusive before being ported to Windows.

It was the first major spreadsheet to be GUI-based from the ground up. It didn’t need Office bundling (which came much later) to dominate, it was by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era.

[TheRealDunkirk]

> by far the superior spreadsheet in the Windows 3.0/3.1 era

Quattro Pro is waiting outside the door. He says he'd like to have a word. ;-)