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Comment by queuebert | Hacker News Reader

> Four decades later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called Excel “the best consumer product we ever created.” He doesn’t just see it as an enterprise tool. It’s for everything. Nadella said he simply can’t imagine a world without Excel. “People couldn’t make sense of numbers before, and now everyone can.”

So the best thing they ever did was make a clone of Lotus 1-2-3 and VisiCalc? Sounds about right.

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I wanted to make some counter-snark like "I'm pretty sure VisiCalc didn't have mouse support" but I wanted to fact check myself and found a delightful write-up comparing VisiCalc 18 years ahead of Excel, so I will take your side, MS takes credit for someone else's invention as usual, but inventing is only the first step to delivering product.

>> "To change a cell, you move the cursor to it with the arrow keys (the original design used a mouse, but the PCs of that day did not have a mouse) and then type the new value"

http://www.bricklin.com/firstspreadsheetquestion.htm

You're just trying to be contrarian for imaginary internet points. Satya is right about this one.

I'm not trying to be anything. He's demonstrably incorrect. It's just talking points, and I'm calling it out.

Microsoft has only ever forced standardization of aggressively mediocre software. In every case, be it OS, spreadsheets, or word processing, there has been a much better competitor who lost out due to market forces, not quality.

People also seem to forget spreadsheets as a concept pre-date computing.

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