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I guess you don’t remember a time when spreadsheets sold for $495 a seat. And that was just the spreadsheet. IIRC, Excel 1.0 retailed for $99.

One source[1] says the first release of Excel (for the Mac, in 1985) had a price of $395, or about $1,200 in inflation-adjusted 2026 dollars.

Forced +$30 per seat per month to get people loaded into their proprietary AI

It's $8.30/month. It's cheaper than Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Over 50 years' time that's $4980.

50 years ago you needed about 5 million bucks to get started with electronic spreadsheets on your IBM mainframe