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30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet

Posted by timothy on from the malignant-cells dept.

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.

9 of 407 comments (clear)

  1. What if... by DSmith1974 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.
  2. Cannot believe I am saying this... by DrWho520 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...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.

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    1. Re:Cannot believe I am saying this... by flyingfsck · · Score: 5, Insightful

      One day when you try to run your own company, you'll realize the problem with what you said above. The fact is that trying to find financing and projects to execute, in order to keep 500 engineers busy, really ain't easy.

      --
      Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
    2. Re:Cannot believe I am saying this... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Joel Spolsky once wrote:

      Programmers need a Subversion repository. Getting a Subversion repository means you need a network, and a server, which has to be bought, installed, backed up, and provisioned with uninterruptible power, and that server generates a lot of heat, which means it need to be in a room with an extra air conditioner, and that air conditioner needs access to the outside of the building, which means installing an 80 pound fan unit on the wall outside the building, which makes the building owners nervous, so they need to bring their engineer around, to negotiate where the air conditioner unit will go (decision: on the outside wall, up here on the 18th floor, at the most inconvenient place possible), and the building gets their lawyers involved, because we're going to have to sign away our firstborn to be allowed to do this, and then the air conditioning installer guys show up with rigging gear that wouldn't be out of place in a Barbie play-set, which makes our construction foreman nervous, and he doesn't allow them to climb out of the 18th floor window in a Mattel harness made out of 1/2" pink plastic, I swear to God it could be Disco Barbie's belt, and somebody has to call the building agent again and see why the hell they suddenly realized, 12 weeks into a construction project, that another contract amendment is going to be needed for this goddamned air conditioner that they knew about before Christmas and they only just figured it out, and if your programmers even spend one minute thinking about this that's one minute too many.

      To the software developers on your team, this all needs to be abstracted away as typing "svn commit" on the command line.

      That's why you have management.

  3. Re:What if... by Rogerborg · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Then we'd go back to making decisions based on gut instinct, rather than what we do now: have beancounters revise their assumptions until the spreadsheet confirms our gut instinct.

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  4. bad analogy - think crank by Reality+Master+201 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:bad analogy - think crank by hazem · · Score: 5, Insightful

      we could have automated the process... However, rather than work with us...

      I used to work in IT and now I'm a "business user" and I'm all for getting IT to simplify, automate, and improve processes.

      However, what starts as a simple request to automate some simple but tedious task, or provide a way to link 2 sets of data ends up being treated like a multi-million dollar project that will need a team of 10 people 6 months and many hours of meetings (all charged to my budget) to put together a feasibility study, which will then be put into a queue where it will be evaluated next fiscal year by the prioritization committee, which, if approved (and it won't because there's a huge project consuming ALL discretionary IT resources) will still take another year and a half to design, test, QA, and deploy.

      So instead of doing that, I spend a couple hours to write, test, and document some little Excel/VBA tool or some simple Access import-query-export solution that easily solves the problem, saving my employees loads of time (while typically improving their accuracy as tedious, manual tasks are often error-prone themselves) so they can focus on things like running the business.

      As I said, I'd love to have IT solve these little problems because they are so often "low hanging fruit" that should take very little effort to do while saving many hours of work. But we always get told, "No", "Next Year", or "We'll need to conduct a study", when if they had just sent a low-level coder over to work for a couple hours it would have been done before I could schedule a meeting with all the "stakeholders" who would be conducting the study.

      Having been in IT, I understand completely how bothersome it is to deal with things when the users go rogue - but if IT is unresponsive or provides no other alternative, then that is exactly what what they'll do.

  5. Re:What if... by jacksonj04 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People would stop combining it with godawful macros in an attempt to cobble together a slow and inefficient relational database with no sensible query or reporting tools and use a real RDBM instead.

    --
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  6. Re:What if... by westlake · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Millions of secretaries -- I mean Admin Assistants -- would have to type department phone lists with word processors.

    This is funny.

    But it cuts close to the truth.

    Spreadsheet planning wasn't the novelty.

    The novelty was that plans could be updated instantaneously - without employing hundreds of clerics and dozens of machines to make it happen.