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Comment by _dain_ | Hacker News Reader

Just like Coca-Cola isn't competing with Pepsi, but with water; most B2B SaaS companies aren't competing with other SaaSes, but with Excel. Many of them don't even realize it. Excel seems to have a kind of "hacker repulsion field" that makes programmers consistently underestimate its capabilities.

Did you know that nowadays it has lexical scoping, dynamically sized spill arrays, first class lambdas, map/filter/reduce in formulae? Plus an entire separate purely functional query language + a relational database-like thing for ETL work? Normies are flinging closures around!

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Just imagine if middle management figured they could do thier stuff in Excel that they pay $Foo SaaS vendor 9k per month for.

Yep, you guessed it they'd just do absolutely nothing.

The repulsion field is incredibly strong. Even with known field harmonics and modulation frequency I just can’t get through!

Cool that there have been radical improvements in recent years, that haven't broken legacy spreadsheets.

oh yeah, M Language is my jam. powerquery is awesome, ive made it do terrible things, and it worked great. Helped me troubleshoot python code by building the same script in powerquery/m language.

How does this make sense given the fact that both sell water?

And Excel's capabilities are hidden behind an awful interface, so it's only natural that people are repulsed into the alternatives if they have the required knowledge/skills

tap water

Dasani (coke) and Aquafina (pepsi) are municipal water (i.e. tap).

>How does this make sense given the fact that both sell water?

In that Cola and Pepsi sell overpriced flavored and colored mixes of water, as opposed to regular water, which is the "default drink".

>And Excel's capabilities are hidden behind an awful interface, so it's only natural that people are repulsed into the alternatives if they have the required knowledge/skills

Excel's capabilities are all about the inteface. That's where the power comes from, not from having a SUM method or a way to filter.

> Excel's capabilities are all about the inteface

And so are its limitations (though not inherently so, just through decades of neglect), that's where the power is handicapped despite the existence of "first class lambdas" and the like, which explains the field

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