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30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet
theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.
I think spreadsheets evolved almost zero in the last 30 years. Word processing got fonts, colors... Excel is just VisiCalc with buttons.
When you have shifts?
The spreadsheet was never invented????
Errrr Divide by Zero
...John C. Dvorak were no longer paid to write lame articles?
It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony, Samuel Clemens.
Dvorak is an idiot. To use the old adage: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people."
If a bank trusts a spreadsheet based on a bad formula that is provided by the bank itself, is it the spreadsheet's fault? If the CEO chooses that saving 1 cent a year by outsourcing the call center to India, is that the spreadsheet's fault? Please.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
The only way to get rid of Dvorak is to deny him him the clicks. Don't follow the link.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Oh my goodness, did they really write it in assembler? I always imagined they already used high-level languages at that time.
And nevertheless, the non-availability of multiplication or division is honestly the smallest problem when programming the 6502 in assembler. Using a decent macro assembler it does not take a lot of effort to implement these two instructions. What i personally collided more with where the awkward addressing techniques of the 6502, and, of course, the quite um... limited stack, and of course, having only 3 registers sucked. I liked the Z80 much more form a low-level viewpoint. But in never though about the absence of multiplication instructions as a bad thing, just a little training....
No multiply or divide? Oh Noes!!1!!
Meh
"On most older microprocessors, bitwise operations are slightly faster than addition and subtraction operations and usually significantly faster than multiplication and division operations,"
mod me offtopic but... what the fuck is wrong with his head? It looks like somebody stuck it in a vice and gave it a few turns (that would explain his "logic"...). Does he have John McCain cancer or something?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
...Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims...
That which infuriates me the most about the tech sector is corporate executives building wealth upon the backs of laboring engineers. I have yet to receive an explanation as to why some VP somewhere gets to make ten times as much myself. When the company is not making record profits, it is an engineering problem. When we are raking in the dough, it is an executive success. No one ever looks to see how difficult the problem is because, they cannot fathom the problem being solved. My first day at orientation, you could tell the engineers from the financial analysts. We were in Dockers and collars and they were in three piece suits. Where did we go so wrong that support staff are the ones elevated to executive positions? Why is balancing a checkbook a more executive skill than writing the tool that tool used to balance the checkbook?!?
This only thing that disgusts me more is sharing a sentiment with Dvorak.
The cancel button is your friend. Do not hesitate to use it.
...implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor...
Are you kidding? They did Elite on that platform. Subtracting losses from profits doesn't even *need* a multiply.
Then we would never have appreciated the benefits of W-W-Windows 386 !
Spreadsheets aren't like guns, they're like methamphetamine.
It starts out innocently enough - a couple sheets here or there - maybe a long weekend working out a household budget. It's all good fun. By the time you realize a problem, though, you're hitting the 65k row limit. You're writing VBA and macros, you're embedding external data sources - and haven't backed up your work for days. It drives you insane and causes brain damage.
Just say no to spreadsheets.
Who'd 've thought :-)
Google for visicalc.com and download from the second link.
BEWARE: DO NOT run it on your main computer. Use a windows virtual machine or dosbox on *nix. It runs perfectly in both even after these years.
- mritunjai
"where's the evidence of improvement in the way business runs or works? Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk."
So Dvorak would want us to all drive the biodegradable pieces of crap cars from 1979? Those Fords and K-Cars were really awful. Then there was the AMC Pacer ... a goldfish bowl on wheels ...
Last I looked, computers were consumer goods. My laptop is a lot higher quality, and much more capable, than the Heathkit 4004 I would have had to settle for 30 years ago. Ditto my cell phone compared to ANY "portable/mobile" phone 30 years ago. And both, after adjusting for inflation, are MUCH cheaper today.
Kevin Smith on Prince
The Macintosh uses an experimental pointing device called a 'mouse'. There is no evidence that people want to use these things. I dont want one of these new fangled devices. - Dvorak.
Yeah, it's all the spreadsheet's fault. As soon as MS added the MAXIMIZE_STOCK_VALUE and HIDE_FROM_SEC functions, we were doomed.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I've used visicalc. I was just a kid, but my friends dad had it for the apple ][+.
It was weird, because it had no up down arrows on the keyboard, you had to toggle up/down left/right mode by hitting the spacebar.
Love it or hate it, visicalc made computers way more useful. I don't think it was a bad thing
John C. Dvorak is the Ellsworth Toohey of the technology world.
If Dvorak thinks that accounting and finance were bit players in the history of the world until the invention of the electronic spreadsheet, he's even more completely out of touch with reality than I thought. Maybe that's true in the parallel Dvorak universe where OS/2 took over the world and dialup BBSes became a multi-billion-dollar industry, but in this universe, accounting and finance has been a major player since, well, the invention of money and writing.
I actually like Dvorak, but having read him since the days when Computer Shopper was as large as an urban phone book, I have come to recognize that his predictions, while sometimes reflecting what ought to happen, seldom if ever reflect what actually does happen, and his analyses range from the silly to the outright bizarre.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
What is actually killing the economy is the business major. There are too many people who don't know a trade going around thinking that the world owes them something.
If you think that it's bad that some executives do some calculations... think of the possible results when non-engineers attempt to do engineering jobs. The moment I step into a project, the standard 1st task is to correct all the mistakes that were made so far by the people who wrote the project proposal (and started to calculate too) and the lab guys. No offense to them, they do good work, but they would save us all time if they'd let _me_ do _my_ work. After that's done, I then to proceed to do the calculations in a programming language like Matlab (Octave)... which is much faster, more free and will hide mistakes much more professionally. *hides*
your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II.
Not those of us who actually programmed the Apple II, or programmed any computer back then. Even the original IBM PC had only 64k of memory (expandible). I wrote a battle tanks game on the Sinclair 1000 with its 4k of memory and its 1mhz chip. Of course, with that little memory and slow speed it couldn't be written in BASIC so I had to write it in assembly and hand assemble the machine code, and enter it byte by byte into memory.
No multiply of divide? So what? Multiplication is just serial addition, and division is simply serial subtraction. 4x4=4+4+4+4. Geek side? Gimme a break, that's stuff you learn in the third grade.
Now to quote Clint Eastwood from his new movie Gran Torino, "get off my lawn!"
Free Martian Whores!
Ever notice Nostrodamus always "predicts" things after they happen, not before? I call him a predictor of the past.
I've watched Dvorak since I started in the industry in 1978. His job is to be wrong, pretty constantly. He's just doing his job.
Where's the hate for powerpoint? If you really want to blame a piece of software for spawning crappy, Dilbertesque, counter-productive executive culture, look no further.
Power corrupts.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But it takes Powerpoint to really fuck things up.
look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II
The majority of the 6502's instructions were 8 bit. I wrote quite a lot in 6502, and several times had to code 16 or 24 bit multiply/divide routines. BASIC even had floating point math which I never ventured into. Anytime you wanted to deal with a number > 255 you had to juggle carries.
Overall it's a very good learning experience. The first thing any assembly course teaches you is how to do some of the more complicated instructions using simpler instructions. My first touch with a higher assembly (VMS VAX) was a cakewalk because they were basically teaching me things that were old hat. ("and this week we are going to learn how to do multiplication and division without using the MUL and DIV opcodes..." *yawn*) And when they let us use the more powerful instructions (multiply, SORT, omg this is assembly??) I could sleepwalk through coding. It felt a lot more like BASIC than assembler.
I don't think I can have any respect for assembly that has more than 200 opcodes.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Speaking of 6502 programming feats, back in 1982 I worked for Acorn computers in the UK, writing software for the 2MHz 6502 based BBC microcomputer, which incidently we also used as our development machines. The BBC micro had 16K of ROM for the built-in BASIC interpreter and low level "OS", another 16K of address space into which you could map any one (at a time) of the other 16K software ROMs in that machine, and 16K or 32K of RAM depending on the model. Much software was sold on ROM - there were four sockets built-in or you could get expansion boards to allow more - but only one at a time could be selected since there was only 16K of address space for these.
One project I did at Acorn (with another guy) was to implement a Pascal development system for the BBC micro that we crammed into two of these add-in 16K ROMs. This was no cut down version - is was a full-blown ISO certified version of Pascal, the first ever implementation for a Microcomputer to implement the standard and achieve ISO certification (ISO Pascal is different from P-system Pascal which had preceded it).
So, what we fitted into 32K was:
- An ISO Pascal compiler, which compiled programs down to a P-code like stack-based virtual instruction set
- A virtual machine/interpreter for the instruction set
- A 6502 machine code relocator
- The complete Pascal run-time library (full floating point, IO library, heap, etc)
- A full-featured full-screen editor with regex find/replace (with as-you-type syntax parsing and highlighting), block copy/move/delete, etc (in only 4K of code)
- Command line interpreter
Now bear in mind that only 16K of this could actually be in the address space at one time...
The way we managed to squeeze all this in was to have the compiler in one 16K ROM, and the rest in the other. The compiler was written in ISO Pascal and self-compiled to our virtual instruction set. We had to add a few "macro" instructions especially for the compiler in order to get it under the 16K limit. The rest of the software (which I wrote) was all in 6502 assembler. Now consider that to run the compiler you also needed the virtual machine, but that was in a different ROM which could only be mapped into the same address space as the compiler (hence replacing it)... What I did was organize the VM/interpreter into pure code, pure data, and relocatable data (address tables), and implement a 6502 machine code relocator (recognize each instruction type, and know how many byyes they were, and whether they had an address component that needed relocating) which copied the VM out into RAM therefore allowing it to co-reside in the address space with the compiler.
It was a very fun project, not only because of the technical challenge (this was my first job out of college), but also very much because of the memory constraint. I had to use every 6502 trick in the book to eliminate every spare byte to squeeze the assember half of it into it's 16K ROM. Those from this generation may remember things like using XOR A, A as an alternative to LD A, 0 to save a byte, changing tail recursion/calls to jumps (JSR subroutine, RET -> JMP subroutine), taking advantage f known processor flag state to use 2 byte "conditional" (but not if you know the state) branches in place of 3 byte absolute jumps, etc, etc.
Toot toot!
I'm surprised anyone still pays him.
Problem is obvious if you've ever been in a Fortune 500 senior management meeting making an investment decision. You have one proposal portrayed in too exhaustive detail for you to be able to see the assumptions. What you need is a few likely scenarios in little enough detail that you can debate the assumptions. Then you have the result presented in PPT slides which you have not seen before, where after the fact you have no idea why the group decided what they did. Or often, even what they decided. What you actually want is prose, which everyone has read in advance, which makes the thing crystal clear: what, why, how.
Solution: keep Excel in Accounting. Do business decision making with 5 page written papers, 1 page of financials, max 3 graphics. No overheads except the graphics. It works.
Spreadsheets may enable Evil, but are not Evil in themselves.
On the other hand, PowerPoint is Pure Evil.
Spreadsheets generally annoy me because many programming concepts I'm used to are watered down. I find most of the formula stuff to be a pain. Maybe somewhere out there is some sort of "spreadsheet for smart people" where I can use say python expressions to manipulate a big table of data.
As for spreadsheets leading to bad decisions -- it's really the fault of bad models. Just because you can extrapolate into the future doesn't mean that prediction is worth a darn. The phrase "if this trend continues" usually makes my ass twitch. Shouldn't you first do some check to see if that extrapolation means something?
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Spreadsheets have been around for a long time; there are cuneiform tablets still around that showed how many cattle somebody had. I've got 50-year old reports in my office that have spreadsheets of financial ratios. The only difference now is that they're made on computers. Before a spreadsheet by itself can be blamed for anything, it will need to have at least as many cells as the human brain.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Back in the late 80's, Borland wrote all of their compilers in Assembly. That's how they were able to compile 27,000 lines of Pascal code per minute on a '286 machine.
I shudder to think of the difficulty of that endeavor.
That's not the way I remember it. VisiCalc is the quintessential Killer App. Businesses bought Apple IIs because of VisiCalc.
There was no need for it to "sneak in" anywhere.
Forgive me for saying this, but you went "wrong" with your career choice in college. The reason why "support" staff are elevated above you and your fellow engineers (I'm assuming you're an engineer) is that they're administrative support staff, i.e. they are actually trained to run a business (or aspects of the business) and they'll be promoted within the administration of the company; whereas engineers are part of the production team, which means that engineers will probably rise only as far as project or department head. Executives build wealth on the "backs of laboring engineers" (and sales clerks, machinists, programmers, etc) because you're commodities.
I can understand your frustration, but the fact is that in any organization--large, medium, small, corporate, military, religious, political, whatever--there will be only a very few who are able to run the whole thing, and all things being equal, the qualified ones will rise to the top, provided that they're also politically savvy. An unfortunate fact of life is that there also exist within any organization the ass-kissers, toadies, and fast-talking con artists who scheme their way to positions well above their level of competence. Such glaring injustices will rankle obviously, but regrettably the vast majority of people within an organization really don't have a clue how the whole thing works. Forgive me again for saying this, but your post only reinforces this notion; you really don't know what's going on from an administrative standpoint, and I get the strong sense that you are either totally naive about, or disgusted by, organizational intrigue and politics. Good for you, if that's the case. You probably won't get a seat on the corporate jet, but you get to keep your soul.
And I'm certainly not presuming to suggest that engineers cannot run a company; my eldest brother was an engineer who worked at his chosen profession for only about a year after graduating, then went into the financial services industry and took to it like a duck to water. He is now the owner of a successful mutual fund company.
I think that Dvorak is putting too much blame on the spreadsheet: it was just an accelerant on an already-burning fire. As Frank Zappa said when asked, "What do you think happened in this country?"
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
Dvorak doesn't even know the difference between finance and accounting. Accountants don't really spend a lot of time with spreadsheets. I know because I am a certified accountant myself. Spreadsheets are used far more by finance analysts. Accountants track what happened in the past much like a secretary keeps minutes of a meeting. Finance analysts try to predict what will happen in the future and their main tool is the spreadsheet. These are not normally the same person though there obviously is overlap. Anyone who actually knows anything about business understands the difference but apparently Dvorak is not among them.
Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions
Right, because no one ever made horrible business decisions before the spreadsheet. Sigh... Used properly, spreadsheets let us make more informed, rational decisions instead of shooting from the hip. Modern finance would literally be impossible without spreadsheets or something very much like them. Ever tried to manage a company's books? Without spreadsheets and accounting software you need an army of workers to track the paperwork and calculate the numbers. Furthermore hand calculating results in errors and lots of them. Sure spreadsheets can be used badly like any other tool. They certainly are no magic cure-all for bad analysis and decision making. But that's the user not the tool.
Dvorak asks in the article:
How often in years pastâ"the pre-spreadsheet era, that isâ"did an accountant take over a company?
Frequently. John D Rockefeller was an accountant before he was a titan of industry. There are countless other examples. Accounting is what allows managers of businesses to understand what is going on. Every business manager is by necessity an accountant to some degree. Without accounting they are no different than an airplane pilot without any instruments. It should surprise no one that the people who understand the cash flows best often rise to positions of control, including the role of CEO. A spreadsheet and other computerized tools simply make the job easier and more productive. Apparently Dvorak thinks we should rely on slide rules and multiplication tables and ledger books instead.
Dvorak further asserts:
Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere.
Further evidence of Dvorak's stupidity.
I have worked in a lot of IT positions, and every company I have worked for has always done all of their "real" decision-making on hacked-together spreadsheets. The truth is that the spreadsheet was one of the first "business analysis" tools that was intuitive enough for an end-user to really do power-user things.
That said, Excel and Access "applications" that glue organizations together are the bane of IT's existence. Despite what the sales guys say, all of the company's numbers come out of SAP, Oracle Financials, etc. and into one of these programs to do any useful work with them. I know I'm working on making Office 2007 available to those who want it, and getting some of these Excel and Access 97-era macros carried forward can be...challenging. Access is another horror story -- once a database hits 2 GB in size, file corruption is extremely likely, especially if multiple users are hitting the same database over a network.
If you ever get sick of software development or sysadmin work, and like pain, I guarantee there will be work available for anyone willing to wade through a million lines of VB spaghetti code written by an MBA who took an Excel class in 1996.
Move right along folks. When you see quotes from Dvorak you know you better look the other way.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
I get letters and "announcements" that are Excel documents for some reason.
Turns out the reason is because the user treats the cells as "Tabs" and uses them to "Center" text and "Indent" things, create "Columns"
These people have no clue how to use a Word Processor to format their document and they also have no clue how to use a Spreadsheet program for what it was intended for either.
I know someone else who treats a Spreadsheet like a Database.
Except what they have is a Text File in Excel Format.
No defined fields, can't sort because they typed the info in to "look good" but serial numbers are in Different Columns!
Line Breaks when they reached the end of their 17" screen really hoses the thing good.
Can't export the data to CSV or anything to make it useful elsewhere but "IT'S ALL STORED ON A SPREADSHEET!" which was the original mandate.
I like microcars
Just two points. 1. Wasn't it a spreadsheet model that told NASA that the probability of a piece of insulation foam causing damage to the space shuttle was negligible? Misuse of spreadsheets CAN and has cost lives. 2. Not all that long ago, at my former employer, there were accountants assigned to take standard accounting reports produced by the financial system and key those reports into a spreadsheet. They did not do ANY calculations and never used the sheets for anything. They just copied them -- manually -- into a spreadsheet! And yes it was a Government operation! We thought of them as our own Bartlebys.
John's young, so I suppose we can forgive his limited view of history.
Before there were CFOs there were VPs of Finance--every one an accountant.
Before there were spreadsheets, there were financial accounting programs, software for costing and forecasting. There were languages like APL that manipulated arrays of data. These were used by the accountants on the VP Finance's staff.
It's not the accountants that were empowered by the spreadsheet, but the folks in operations: marketing and facilities and manufacturing. The accountants always had numbers to crunch and lots of compute power to crunch them.
Unfortunately, that doesn't make as good a kvetch. He's right about one thing though...the current financial collapse is due to financial decision makers (mostly accountants) putting too much faith in a calculation that can be done on a spreadsheet. Value at Risk was the "gold standard" measure of a portfolio which turned out to be a trap for the unwary. This included most of Wall Street with the possible exception of Goldman Sachs.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
As Nietzsche said, "Our pride tells us that what we are good at is most difficult for men."
Are you any good at selling products to clients? Negotiating profitable contracts with them? Doing market research and understanding the results? Pacifying angry clients?
Are you willing to work 60 hours a week standard, going up from there whenever doing so will gain the company a competitive edge?
In small businesses, these are the skills that put someone on top...the coding is necessary as well but most coders aren't willing (or able) to do all of these other things which are every bit as necessary.
If you are willing and able...then start your own business. Then you can be the one on top, and you can discover for yourself whether or not it makes sense for you to put engineers above executives in power or salary. If you are not willing to do this, but would instead prefer the security of a stable paycheck that doesn't push you outside of your work/life balance...then quit whining and accept the consequences of your own choice.
Spreadsheets are often used for purposes which go above and beyond their intention, acting in some cases as almost a general-purpose programming environment.
Since this abuse is so common, why not take it to the next level and make a programming language which acts like a spreadsheet?
http://www.subtextual.org/
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
There's nothing wrong with "worser," as a word. It's been in the English language with the same meaning you appear to attribute to it for about 500 years (judging by the OED entry).
Hell, it even shows up in Shakespeare:
The biggest problem with spreadsheets is that they are hard to debug.
If all you do is add columns of numbers, everything is fine, and mostly accurate (unless you miss the top or bottom cell).
But once you get fancy, it's like spaghetti assembly code, riddled with gotos.
Oh, and by the way, you can never see the entire program on one page, you have to look at the code through a soda straw, one cell at a time.
i just put ubuntu (wubi) on my wintel box, and....big deal; for a user like me, it is really no better, and probably worse, then windows. /. would be about porting PDP11 to RS400
What is the connection to visi calc ?
If if hadn't been for visicalc, pcs would still cost 8 grand each, would have a few Kb of memory, and if it existed at all,
That is, people buy machines to do something, and until linux does something different unique that windows can't it will never succeed for the avg person - perhaps this is all obvious to the avg user.
i've read an article about visicalc once that said because apple II didn't have an interrupt handling system, they had to fill the code with breaks to simply read the keyboard.
wild ride that one...
What ? Me, worry ?
Dvorak? He's still around? People still READ his stuff?
Indeed. Early computer store owners talk about business people walking in and asking for a "VisiCalc machine". Apple possibly wouldn't have had enough money to develop the Mac if not for VisiCalc sparking it's sales. It was 3rd behind TRS-80 and Commodore PET until VisiCalc. (It may have been ahead of PET in the US, though. PET had good international sales.)
Table-ized A.I.
My God, I miss Improv! Thanks for the reminder.
There was a time when I could do everything (or thought I could do everything) with Improv, askSam, WordPerfect, and Harvard Graphics. I'm not sorry to leave HG behind, but I think I could still do everything *worth* doing with the other named tools.
Hey, you kids! Get off my lawn! :-)
If you read the article, you get the impression that Dvorak thinks the spreadsheet is recent invention (30 years old). You'd think an old-timer like him would realize that spreadsheets have been around as long as the practice of accounting, and that they were going strong back at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The only difference was, you paid for an employee instead of a computer to crunch the numbers. Yes, the speed gain in spreadsheet usage definitely increased its influence, but really... spreadsheets are older than John McCain (and that's old!)!
This thing some people call a "chair", worst invention ever. Now people sit around instead of getting stuff done.
No other programming language could have done it.
Back in the 70s computer scientists had this vague notion of the "next step" after compiled procedural text-based programming. Something like FORTRAN, C, LISP were called third generation after machine language and assembly. One approach to fourth generation was "visual programming". Some work had been done on flowcharts that would compile themselves after you drew them - severely crippled by the inadequate computer graphics of the 1970s. Then the revolutionary "table" paradigm of Visicalc came along. Tables gave a visual feel for the connectivity data and formulae. The spreadsheet program provided pre-programmed elements such as display, I/O, and control flow. The user just added data types and formulae. Plus it was readily implemented in the text terminals of the era.
There's frighteningly still a market for paper-tape based calculators (they cost a lot more than you'd think) for, primarily, older accountants who want everything on a tape total.
This is so true but sadly it's not just the old guys. I'm an accountant (and an engineer) and I can't fathom why anyone would use a paper tape calculator when they have a spreadsheet available. But many accountants just love them. Why? Because they are simple and they know how to use them. I'm not sure whether to laugh, ridicule or cry when I see someone punching in a column of numbers for the 4th time because they made a typo - again. Personally I think paper tape calculators should be banned but they'll be with us for a long time I'm afraid.
Be wary of most accountants, there's a reason it's not offered as a major at top schools
What are you talking about? It might be called a business administration degree with an accounting concentration but the result is the same and many of the top business schools offer such a degree. Accounting firms in fact virtually demand some sort of accounting focused curriculum if you want a job as a CPA. Even outside pure accounting firms, a huge number of accounting job posting "require" an undergrad degree in accounting.
- having brains in the field is more often a detriment than a benefit.
Sorry no, that just isn't true. An ability to tolerate boredom, follow arbitrary rules and poorly designed procedures perhaps, but stupidity will generally get you fired when you are handling the cash.
I'm an engineer. My supervisor is an engineer. Our department head is an engineer. Our vice president is an engineer. Holy smokes, even the president of the company is an engineer. The CEO? He's a bean counter.
As someone who is both an engineer AND an accountant, I can assure you that your president, VP, and even department head are all de-facto accountants as well. Accounting isn't some mysterious thing that only accountants do. If you are responsible for a budget, or handle/manage cash in any way, shape or form, you are doing accounting. Even as an engineer if you have any responsibility for the cost of the product you are producing, congratulations, you are doing cost accounting.
Accounting is simply recording and monitoring what happens to the assets and liabilities of the company. It's as integral to management as math is to engineering. You simply can't manage a business without getting your fingers into accounting. Just because your diploma says engineering doesn't change that fact that it probably is part of your job. Being good at understanding cash flows might help you get to the top faster if that is what you want but you simply will NOT get to the top or stay there without understanding accounting.
They did the world a great service and many an accountant and tax person got rich using that program and the ones that came after that - more work - less time.
Bob Frankston signed an unopened copy of VISICALC I own.
The article makes me think of an idea that I believe is found in the book, The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb. If it's not there, it's in his earlier book.
The idea is that human thinking is prone to several faults. It's a flaw in the construction of our brain. I believe this is something evolutionary psychology talks about. Anyway, Taleb says that human beings are woefully prone to looking at the past and convincing themselves that past data is a sure guide to what the future will bring. His idea is not just that we are prone to this mistake, but that in effect we love making this mistake -- or perhaps closer to his point, we feel great when we are making this mistake.
Putting Dvorak's article in this context, people look at spreadsheets -- and at all the wonderful graphs and charts you can make from the data contained therein -- and are lured, cognitively, into painting a particular picture of the future. To the natural inclination of our minds, this picture is so beautifully convincing that we have to actively work to resist its charms. It's almost as if we can't help buying into the future our inclinations, with the help of our spreadsheets, sell to us.
This is a small example from what is a larger problem in economics, which only some schools of economics recognize: namely, economic history is a poor guide to the future. (By contrast, the entire field of econometrics posits itself on making "mathematical predictions" based on economic history.)
Dvorak's an ass, in my opinion; but I think he may have stumbled onto something here.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
That which infuriates me the most about the tech sector is corporate executives building wealth upon the backs of laboring engineers. I have yet to receive an explanation as to why some VP somewhere gets to make ten times as much myself.
You won't like the explanation but I'll try. The reasons are complicated and numerous. What you have to remember is that I'm talking in general terms - overall markets, not specific cases.
Is all this fair? I leave that to you but I would argue probably yes. Just because you do something valuable doesn't mean you are in a position to command a large amount of monetary compensation for what you do.
Why is balancing a checkbook a more executive skill than writing the tool that tool used to balance the checkbook?!?
That's your problem - you think being an executive is about balancing a checkbook. It's not and never will be. Doing good engineering is hard but so is management and the skill sets don't overlap much. Engineers create tools and that is incredibly valuable but using those tools is valuable too and we engineers tend to under-appreciate how valuable it really is.
unfortunately usually misused.
A spreadsheet is not a database.
A spreadsheet is not for pretty formats.
A spreadsheet should not be used for recurring analysis.
A spreadsheet *is* great for figuring out your mortgage payments.
A spreadsheet *is* great for doing college/hs laboratory analysis.
A spreadsheet *is* great for one-off, quick calc, and preliminary design work.
Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme would still be rolling in the dough, except for one fatal flaw:
Bernie used MS Excel for accounting, adding a row for every new investor. He ran out of rows this last year, which resulted in the inability to add any new investors to the fund.
That is why whenever I've been somewhere; I've always tried to get time set aside for Jr. programmers or new hires or interns to do simple automations or workflows. it really boosts the public perception of IT if we appear to be closing a lot of incidents and the rank-and-file workers and low-level supervisors see we take their business processes seriously. It goes a long way to have a "wish list" from supervisors/users that can be submitted in a page or less. Big tasks with a large scope get turned into incidents for the larger system (enhancements); little ones get added to a queue. I'm of the thought I'd rather have my Jr Programmers or new hires or interns not familar with the larger systems pump out small solutions which sometimes are just a scheduled task, a script, a report or some sort or a small web application so at least we're ensuring it is done correctly, is documented, and is a great way to see what their skills are and put on a good public face. It gives them some face time with the users and shows me their coding skill, design skills, communications, indepdent work skills, self motivation (grab the next one when you are done) and gives them time to get to know the teams, learn how they work, learn their standards rather than just tossing them in and being dead weight until they get up to speed.
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
So many business decisions come from CYA decisions. What you are describing is just doing some sort of analysis for CYA. "Hey, our analysis said everything was fine."
Real data-driven companies do analysis differently.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
or at least mine did...
I find myself agreeing with him, somewhat, from what I can read in the summary -- though I refuse to click through and give him traffic.
The real problem with the spreadsheet is that it replaces actual programming, thus allowing non-programmers to develop spectacular messes.
Two things stand out right away: It's not a very good programming tool, because it's not particularly DRY by nature -- you write the formula, then do the equivalent of copy'n'paste to repeat it down an entire column, usually applying to that row. That's just one example, but a spreadsheet that evolves into an application is a maintenance nightmare.
And it's not a very good non-programmer tool, because so much is hidden in the default view. For example, in the above case, the formula isn't what's visible in that table cell -- the result is. If an error creeps into one of those cells, not only is it a nightmare trying to find which one (since you have a thousand versions of the same function to wade through), you can't even see them without clicking on each cell.
It also puts the focus on the eventual results, rather than on the mechanism behind them.
It works fine if you just want to display some tabular data, but that's about it -- and it's overkill for that.
Other than that, if you're a non-programmer, don't use it for anything so complicated you can't recreate it from scratch in a minute or so. If you're a programmer, you should already know about some better tools -- interactive prompts, real SQL databases, HTML tables or PDFs for output, etc.
I don't know if this has anything to do with what Dvorak actually wrote, since I didn't read it. But I do agree that spreadsheets suck.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It may be the 30th anniversary of VisiCalc but spreadsheets were in use on mainframes long before that. The obsession with tiny computers is still as strong as ever.
Hi,
First, Iâ(TM)m posting AC because I donâ(TM)t want to run the risk of being identified by my company, not fellow /. Users.
Spreadsheets are one of the most abused tools in computing. In that sense, I totally agree with the article. Also, willingness from CEOs/management to accept figures in a spreadsheet without EVER questioning them is almost terrifying.
Never EVER allow a spreadsheet âpower userâ(TM) access to the company database, the possibilities for doing some dumb mistake like double counting a value are too horrible to comprehend.
When you cannot avoid spreadsheets, never ever append data to a spreadsheet! God knows what little formulas are hiding away, doing âoeimportantâ things. Things that will make the spreadsheet useless without anyone knowing.
Where I work the spreadsheet is king. There are some management/CEO types that have a really hard time accepting anything thatâ(TM)s not in a spreadsheet. One or two want a level of detail in terms of rows and columns of data that have to bee seen to be believed.
For instance, where I work there is a crappy scheme that for a certain supplier, we pay them a royalty for some of their parts we sell.
Why the hell we donâ(TM)t just pay a premium on those parts when we buy them is beyond me.
The list of parts eligible for a royalty payment is based on the âoethingsâ they are used on. The person the spreadsheet is created for wants to know what the part is, unfortunately a simple description is not enough, it requires about six columns of âcodesâ(TM) specific to the database to tell him exactly what âoethingâ its used on and where, monthly sales of the part from the beginning of the year, yearly sales of the part going back about a decade along with a huge amount of other âoedataâ (I donâ(TM)t want to be too specific).
Not only that, but he wants to know about any other parts from this supplier that we donâ(TM)t pay a royalty for, along with all of the detail already described! I kid you not; this spreadsheet is about 14,000 rows by over a hundred columns. It takes flipping ages to create. All for a figure to pay once a quarter! But the spreadsheet has to be done once a month, go figure!
The thing that makes me most mad is that I could send him an email with just the amount to pay in it or write a program to calculate the figure. Instead we have this god-awful spreadsheet to build. In fact he said over six months ago that he now just looks at the total royalty payment! Yet we still have to waste time producing this colossus of data that will never be analysed by him. In fact, I think he only ever questioned the total once and he asked us to do it.
I fail to understand the mentality that says, give me a spreadsheet with megabytes of data on it over a program that just gives me the figures I need to make a decision. Yes, both have the potential to be wrong, but if both are created by the same people and just as prone to human error, why trust one above the other?
My theory is that spreadsheets make people feel âoeempoweredâ by them. Even if they are given a spreadsheet with a bunch of number in them with a sum formula at the bottom, somehow they feel better than being provided with a program where they press a button and are given the answer.
I suppose those high up in companies would not feel as important if the decisions they made were based on a program that tells them what to do, rather than a complicated spreadsheet thatâ(TM)s filled with data and a total that tells them exactly the same thing.
Mind you, spreadsheets have the advantage of being hard to audit, so a crafty manager/CEO could happily âoeadjustâ a few figures to make things look a little better, not that I would suggest that would ever happen⦠Cough, bankers, cough credit crunch, cough wankers!
I generally don't comment on moderation, but what sort of maniac would moderate that comment as a troll? In what possible way is that trolling?
There's some weird people with moderation points around here!
Bizarre... [Shakes head despairingly]
Says "It's a GREAT DataBase! This is what we are going to use for our entire site!"
Graphing. CEOs can't understand numbers, they make their brains run out their ears. Having the spreadsheet program produce charts and graphs for you is the single most important advancement in accounting since language.
Gee, I don't know about you, but I used VisiCalc. And its companion, VisiPlot.
I built a just-in-time inventory control system for our small manufacturing concern (about 90 parts suppliers, with lead times from 3 months to 2 weeks), tied to past sales overviews and various sales projections.
Had about 8 or 10 "standard" graphs for the boss every two weeks, showing inventory as idle, in QA, in production, in final QA, in shipping, and in repair (warranty and not).
All around 1980 thru 1982, all on an Apple ][+.
That's a good 28 years ago.
Sorry - for all of the new and fab fancy Excel features, as far as I'm concerned, they're simply not there.
The only things I've used Excel for that I didn't with the Visi series are:
1. Quick building of Fourier transform tables when I was just too lazy and hungover to code them up
2. To increase my vocabulary of cursewords (OK - that's not possible, I'm lying, I'm from Detroit) trying to get simple x-y plots without markers
And to the idea that the new spreadsheets provide statistical functions: big whoopie deal. Sum_y, sum_y_squared - you're done, and you've used VisiCalc. (Then again, I'm a snob who believes that you can't work the teleography of statistical equations you've no right to be spewing about statistics anyways.)
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
And no, the spreadsheet is not responsible for all moral decay and infamy in our society.
Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere. At every level of the business scene today, some bean counter does a what-if calculation before making the decisions. The spineless CEO worries about what the shareholders would think if he disagreed with what the spreadsheet and the CFO told him to do. To make him feel better, the board will give the CEO a fat bonus for saving money.
Back in the day, before spreadsheets, the US Military secretly gave the children of US servicemen whooping cough, prisoners were secretly injected with syphillus, and a deal was cut with lead paint manufacturers to leave their remaining inventory on the market rather than recalling it after everyone had given up denying it was harmful. Don't get me started on lead gasoline or cigarettes.
Amoral behavior like this is a property of all *secretive and powerful institutions*. Since the spreadsheet has been invented, private corporations have become more secretive and more powerful, and their directors have become more dedicated to institutional goals as a cultural shift. There is no causation here.
There is a lot of criticism of administrators on this thread - and it is certainly true that the administrators of powerful, secretive institutions tend to personify both the destructive social impact and caustically short-sighted, self-interested purposefully ignorant culture of the institutions where they hold sway.
But as has been pointed out elsewhere, for human beings to act productively and cooperatively, administration and logistics are required. Spreadsheets help with this task immensely - as anyone who's tried to for fucksakes budget a camping trip (how much more would it cost to bring uncle David and his kids too?) can attest.
To clarify my assertion further (and I have to credit this assertion to David F. Noble, who's ideas are primarily reflected here): The technology is neutral - if you don't like what's being done with it, that's entirely the fault of the people using it. To the extent that spreadsheets have had a deleterious effect on our society, that is because powerful individuals saw an opportunity in the technology and exploited it. In a different instutitional structure or with different power relations already in place, the effects would be totally different.
In closing, if anyone actually cares about the future of engineering professions, read Forces of Production by David F. Noble. De-skilled assembly line jobs became the norm not because it was a better way of doing things and not through any inherent properties of machine tools (let alone "market pressure"), but because it served the economic and political interests of the managerical class. Spreadsheets are (relatively minor) among the many tools that the current generation of management tries to use to do the same to engineers today.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
It was almost like having 256 registers. Except that no-one ever saved them when they made a procedure call, so they ended up being 256 global integers, and you had to keep a list of what they were all used for so you didn't stomp on someone else's variables...
About as useful as the secondary register set in the Z80... (yeah, I know, fast interrupt handlers, etc, but still a waste of silicon).
I did like the Z80, but it was probably familiarity as much as anything; the newer processors (eg the Atmel AVR series) have much cleaner instructions sets.
Exactly. I think part of the problem is that there's not only a social disconnect between 'big IT' and 'small IT', there's also a technical disconnect.
Technically, I think what we really need is something of the order of an 'enterprise applet service', where users can create and publish zillions of teeny tiny spreadsheet-like applications, and have them centrally stored and filed and backed up and expressed in a *standardised*, logically consistent language (which is what Excel and Access do NOT provide, changing incompatibly every version) - but leave the actual 'programming' to the users. That would give the reliability of centralised IT with the flexibility of the Excel zoo.
Socially, we really really need to eliminate this artificial and overbearing class distinction between 'users' and 'programmers'. Because in many cases, it actually is the users who do know best what kind of data manipulation they need to do in order to do their jobs. Surprise! Not really. Turns out smart people actually are smart, but just not about everything all at once.
Read Christopher Alexander, Margaret Wheatley and Dee Hock. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in that space of 'chaotic self-organising network structures' - but to support it, we need IT infrastructures and methodologies that provide both democracy and interoperability. Excel gives us the first but not the second. Big ERP systems and processes give us the second but not the first. There's a killer app waiting to be born here.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
My life as an accountant changed forever that day. It took me three months, and many meeting to get the local division of the major oil company I worked for to buy the first Apple in the company. I seem to recall it was $3,000 or so.
After that it was models and spreadsheets galore - well, whatever was 64k or smaller. ("Oh, you want that calculation? Well, I'll have to remove this one.)
Then on to IBM and Lotus 123 and the rest is history.
Were spreadsheets abused, full of errors, and assumed gospel when they weren't? Sure, but they also made clear, in a very short time, important data used to make good decisions.
Now long retired, that moment in SF remains with me as one of those "ah yes" moments in life.
In the early 1980s we used Visicalc (on CBM-IIs) extensively at Commodore Business Machines. Spreadsheets could do what calculators and accounting paper could not: provide a fast summary of quarterly sales in the U.S. I used a spreadsheet to tell if we were on target to make EPS (earnings/share) projections. The Commodore product line was very small, so a 200 line spreadsheet could handle the job. All the financial guys (back then just one woman) knew Visicalc's results should be compared to IT reports. "Did it make sense?" if not, Jack Tramiel, CEO, would show you the door. One time a computer report dropped a leading "1" as Commodore sales passed the $100M mark. We found the error by comparing results on a Visicalc spreadsheet. Care in finance and accounting goes in every direction. The guys from Arthur Anderson had Jack Tramiel's ear, once he realized how stock prices were tied to year-end results verified by AA auditors. It takes one auditor to know one. It didn't take a spreadsheet program for Jack to know he needed those finance guys around him. Yes, spreadsheets made financial modeling much easier, but one shouldn't blame wrong results entirely on the lowly, ubiquitous spreadsheet. By the late '80s the IBM PC had become powerful enough to run newly developed sophisticated econometric and finance risk-based models for financial researchers and the newly minted MBAs bound for Wall Street. If the details of these models are based on poor assumptions, they were hidden in the software and there mistakenly forgotten. New technology always runs ahead of our wise understanding of its limitations and proper use. But it is surprising that it has taken 25 years and a world-wide financial meltdown for us to realize how great the risks were of a surfeit of poorly understood financial models.
I explained that I liked my boring late-model sedan that always starts, always has heating or air conditioning, and unexcitingly goes along with whatever I ask from it.
I like what I heard Billy Joel once say on an episode of American Chopper: "I like how old thing look and how new things work."
It's fine to have nostalgia for older cars - even cool to a point. Mechanically however, most of them would be considered unreliable junk these days. Hell my family sedan is faster and handles better than most sports/muscle cars from before 1980. Cars with 200-300 horsepower are quite common these days even in relatively low end vehicles.
Funny story: A friend of mine who has an old Corvette was bragging about how cool and fast his car could go. His father listened patiently and then says "I'll kick your ass in my Cadillac". My friend sputtered in disbelief and then said "ok, let's go". So they run to the nearest bit of empty straight pavement. Sure enough his dad spools up that big 315HP Northstar engine and... well let's just say it wasn't much of a contest. My buddy's vette only kicks out 205HP so he should have seen that one coming. Good thing they weren't racing for pinks.
when Visicalc first came out, i read a magazine article written
by a small business owner. he had put together a WHAT IF model
for his business and was enjoying himself and modeling all the
various "i wonder what" ideas he had had for many years.
we did the same thing as soon as we copped an Apple II.
you can pry my spreadsheet and PC out of my dead fingers.
they are that important.
clerks, not clerics, and all of them women. Too Many Women