Excel

Excel is a remarkable piece of software. It is used by people from every walk of life. Whether you are developer, data scientist, statistician, analyst. You name it. You can have these wonderful tools that can spit out different kinds of data. Or have scripts to do complex calculations. But at the end of the day, you copy it to an excel workbook to send it off to someone or to do some simple tasks like extrapolation, sorting etc.

They even had to change a DNA naming convention due to a bug in Excel.

Excel is unbundling. SaaS like Airtable and Google sheets are the biggest of them. They connect a typical column-row sheet to the internet. Opening up lot more possibilities. And these services also connect to API services like Zapier. Making it possible to connect it to other applications to read, write or manipulate data.

Excel has a very peculiar architecture. Most pieces of software get more bloated with more features. However, the opposite is true for Excel. Over the years, the amount of features introduced strengthened and expanded it’s use-cases even more. That is a very hard thing to achieve in the software world.