VisiCalc was the original killer app, followed by Lotus 1-2-3. Then Microsoft Excel compelled millions of American and European tinkerers to purchase PC's as well as spend $1,000's on accessories such as tape drives, dot-matrix printers, even voice synthesizers/audio digitizers. People ran their businesses, did their taxes, published zines and managed subscriber lists in spreadsheets.
Three major changes since then:
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cloud vs personal: enables native collaboration
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mobile vs desktop: enables native accessibility
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zero cost software: enables native access
"Zero cost" is actually a barbell, with Apple/Google/Microsoft/Meta/Amazon on one side and Linux/open source/self hosting on the other. Neither is free as in free beer. But zero cost naturally pushes back against the ubiquity of paid AI service providers.
The cutting-edge Excel equivalent today looks something like: orchestration in Google Sheets; ChatGPT / Gemini / DeepSeek for doing things in a parallel space, with a human combi...
