Hacker News Reader

Comment by mc_maurer | Hacker News Reader

"the world’s most important piece of software"

"there’s simply no more powerful piece of software on the planet for turning a mess of numbers into answers and sense"

I never want to be one to downplay Excel's ubiquity and importance, but these statements seem a tad... hypberbolic.

I genuinely would like to hear about a more important piece of software for businesses. Or more used. In those respects I'd have to agree with each of those statements.

I think "for businesses" is probably the caveat here. It feels like a trope to mention it at this point, but I think the world would suffer greater consequences if, say, the Linux kernel broke.

I'd also argue that Excel isn't really the most "powerful" per se, but the most accessible and convenient for sure.

It is for sure the most widely utilized functional coding environment on the planet.

SAP or Salesforce is often the critical piece of software in many an organization. My current assignment (I don't work with SAP though, thankfully) is an energy company with ~3 million customers, each and everyone's data is managed in SAP along energy usage, billing/invoicing, the works. Small army of people managing and maintaining it, too.

But I do find this a fascinating question. What enables human flourishing more? instant messaging, word, excel, cad, photoshop, databases? Or something even more esoteric. I remember someone saying if MacOS disapearred tomorrow, we'll adjust, if older versions of windows disappeared, the world stops.

They are true. As an entrepreneur, 90% of the time my most serious competition is an Excel file.

First statement maybe yes. Hard to find any software used in so many places with so much money / importance etc.

Second statement hard no. It is a good balance of ease of use, familarity and power but for sure not even close to being the most powerful tool to crunch numbers on scale.

"not even close to being the most powerful tool to crunch numbers on scale." So what tool would be that's as broadly accessible as Excel is?

"powerful" is being used there in terms of real world impact: intuitively powerful. Not as in "raw compute power".

Yeah, the crown for raw computer power for crunching numbers at scale would probably go to CUDA or, better yet, TPU job executors.

The fastest supercomputer is actually running AMD chips: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_(supercomputer)

What % of Global GDP would be lost within 24 hours if Excel suddenly disappeared tonight (all other things staying the same)?

A double-digit % would be lost, and possibly a very high one at that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com