Vad man faktiskt har Excel till

Publicerad 21 mars 2012 | 1 kommentar

En lite pärla från Joel Spolsky:

”Forgive me if I now divert into telling you a quick story about my time spent on the Microsoft Excel team way back in 1991. (Yes, I know you were not born yet, but I assure you that computers had been invented. Just hop up here on my knee and shut up.)

Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like “if interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?” For example.

Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel. (…)

Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call ’calculations.’ Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table.

(Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks, devising explosive devices called ’derivatives.’ They used Excel to maximize the bankers’ bonuses on nine out of ten years, and to cause western civilization to nearly collapse every tenth year.)
How Trello is different, 6 jan 2012

… och här är en annan post om vikten av att undersöka vad användarna verkligen gör med systemen: Vad gör hovmästaren med skärmen?

Spolskys bloggpost handlar egentligen om hans ny samarbets- och projektplaneringsverktyg Trello. Jag skriver mer om det i posten Smart, snyggt samarbetsverktyg.

Relaterat: Köp aktier i Excel (24 feb 2013)

Kommentarer