Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jonahbenton | Hacker News Reader

Quick hypothesis on PIMs/editors/etc, from someone who worked on a PIM in the late 1980s and who misses outliners and others- the biggest "unimagined" change is from personal information management to hive-mind information management (via search engines).

It used to be that everyone had to maintain their own personal "library"- now this activity is relegated to cranks and luddites. The second order effect is a change in demand for personal information authoring/management/etc.

A small number of tools, like Scrivener, that may have been competitive in the 1980s, have a market today. The idea of an isolated, focused, non-networked writing environment, surviving like the crocodile.

I don't have a hypothesis for the lack of innovation in the spreadsheet space. The incentives are certainly there. Literally billions/trillions of dollars of assets are subjected to all kinds of spreadsheet risk. Yet that workflow persists, and small and large businesses that attempt to tackle it rise and fall by the wayside.

People build things with Excel because they already have it installed on their office computers. They don't have to file an expense report to pay for a license. They don't have to wrangle IT, beg their manager, or fight with the security team for permission to get it installed.

It doesn't hurt that a wide variety of white-collar workers are already familiar with Excel and stand to gain a great deal of leverage across their job with every small investment in learning about its features, but the incumbent advantage of Excel being universally available, without question or complaint, cannot be overstated.

The problem with any of the old 'killer applications' like spreadsheets is that the network effect now dominates the productivity market.[1] So you'd spend most of your energy on trying to maintain compatibility and feature parity with an application that users are very resistant to moving away from. It's a pretty bad risk/reward unless you have a use case with a 10x (or more) value proposition.

[1] Back when businesses were mainly concerned with internal document sharing it wasn't as much of an issue. But as that expanded to marking up documents with outside lawyers, accountants etc that changed quickly. When the Internet happened for the masses in the late 90's it was game over for most of the competition.

This is a great insight, but there's a third angle too: a lot of these 80s tools assumed you'd invest in them, and not just in cash: you'd give them a lot of time and attention and learning and hence reap expert-user rewards. The world simply isn't like that now, except in niches.

And if you're niche, you can't establish a new file format in a networked world, so you end up having to be interoperable, with markdown in text or xls for spreadsheets. And if you're interoperable, you end up shrinking your market even further: people your users are sharing with don't need to use you.

You really can't build much of a moat on "powerful UX that boils down to a sharable file format". The only way to make space for yourself then is to become a platform in your own right (see emacs/vscode etc).

And what prevents spreadsheets becoming a platform? The install base of Excel, for a kickoff, but also the enormous limitations of csv on the other hand.

In short, the conditions that allowed all those 1980s applications to flourish – bespoke file formats, invested users, no truly dominant players, less networked sharing - have all gone. And so have the apps.

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