Oh God, anything but that. Sorry about the sucky formatting.
I think you're on to something here, actually. The great advances in the first generation of desktop apps were done by the early 1990s. Instead of making the tools more powerful by evolving the core concepts, MS (and other vendors) piled on feature after feature and gimmick after gimmick (like those "agents"). Now they have bloated monsters that can't be evolved any which way. It reminds me of programs that are heaps of special cases piled one on top of the other with no thought for how to effectively generalize (nor would it be surprising if that's just what these particular applications are). MS are now so hamstrung by this legacy that perhaps a window of opportunity for real innovation in the space has finally opened.
Do you have something particular in mind? Its an interesting opportunity and problem. All the solutions I have been considering and working on are in custom applications specific to the problem domain of aerospace.
The general one size fits all solution that is useful but does not lead to the mess Excel creates seems to be what you have in mind.
In aerospace the second most popular tool is Mathcad it seems. Have you seen that?
Although there's rarely enough licenses around (why spend when everyone has Office installed) and a lot of people aren't familiar with it.
Yeah, I have something very particular in mind :) It's nearing launch in fact. You're right that it's a horizontal solution (like Excel, applicable to many domains) and not a vertical one. A lot of custom vertical software is really crappy and really expensive. Vertical systems also tend to be rigid and too hard for people to coax into doing what they need. The more flexible you make them, the more they approach spreadsheets... but then people complain that it's a crappy spreadsheet! (If you've ever heard of Greenspun's 10th Law, one can say that all sufficiently complicated vertical applications end up being a poorly implemented version of half of a spreadsheet.)
The core principle of what we're doing is to build everything around the familiar spreadsheet UI. That UI is hugely valuable for two reasons: it fits the way that users' minds work, and after nearly 30 years it's what everybody knows and likes. The problem isn't with the spreadsheet UI as such, it's with the current generation of spreadsheets that were designed for the problems of 10-20 years ago. The problems have gotten way more complex, but the tool hasn't evolved.
If you think about all the different issues with Excel that lead to messes, in each case you can kind of imagine a spreadsheet that doesn't have that particular problem. Consider the problem of copy-paste creating massive duplication: you can imagine a spreadsheet that gave you the ability to copy something without duplicating it (the cloneage idea). Here's another example: in Excel, it's really hard to do analysis over top of a bunch of different spreadsheets. Even just adding up the totals of the same variables in different sheets is a pain. But one can imagine a spreadsheet that didn't have that problem. Other examples: it's hard to track the history of who changed what in an Excel spreadsheet; it's hard to share Excel spreadsheets or link from one file to another; it's hard to restrict access to certain ranges while allowing it to others; it's hard to modularize complexity. All of these issues together mean that people get into big trouble when they try to do serious work with Excel. Yet it's possible to imagine a modern spreadsheet application that doesn't have these weaknesses.
The question is, if you build this new thing, will it still be a spreadsheet that users recognize and feel comfortable with? Or will it be some foreign thing that nobody wants to learn? That's what killed many attempts to improve on spreadsheets in the past, so we're focused on making something that looks and feels a lot like Excel (but which doesn't create so many messes... or at least makes it easier to create non-messes).
Good lord, I did not intend to write this much. Thanks for listening!
p.s. I'm not familiar with Mathcad. It may well be a good vertical app. Those exist too!
pp.s. Email me (address is in my profile) if you'd like to take a look at what we're working on.
I think you're on to something here, actually. The great advances in the first generation of desktop apps were done by the early 1990s. Instead of making the tools more powerful by evolving the core concepts, MS (and other vendors) piled on feature after feature and gimmick after gimmick (like those "agents"). Now they have bloated monsters that can't be evolved any which way. It reminds me of programs that are heaps of special cases piled one on top of the other with no thought for how to effectively generalize (nor would it be surprising if that's just what these particular applications are). MS are now so hamstrung by this legacy that perhaps a window of opportunity for real innovation in the space has finally opened.