[pskomoroch]

"90% of the world is using Excel and similar tools to analyze and visualize their data."

These types of statements always prompt me to ask "what is the specific problem you are trying to solve?". Replacing Excel? What is the unique advantage beyond a different UI? I think the real product challenge here is identifying why using a different UI or tool would have ROI for the average business user the author is describing. If it doesn't, why would they switch? What is your startup's tool going to do to increase my profits and justify the investment and switching cost?

I've often found it is the analyst and approach, not the tools that make a huge difference on these problems, and for those who care deeply about tools there are many open source options (R, SciPy, etc). Creating more generic "small data" tools runs the risk of solving a problem customers don't have.