March 30, 2026
Pivot tables, pivot drama
Seeing Like a Spreadsheet
Excel built empires, broke hearts, and now stares down AI
TLDR: A big-think essay says spreadsheets reshaped business and hints AI will do it again. Commenters rally for Dan Bricklin’s due credit, argue over who coined the “people as cells” metaphor, confess that consultants party over Excel, and spar about whether AI will elevate or further distort corporate decision-making.
The essay argues that the humble spreadsheet quietly rewired business, turning companies into number-optimizing machines—and the comments section immediately lit up. The loudest cry? Pay the pioneer. One top comment mourns that VisiCalc co-creator Dan Bricklin “should have been richly rewarded,” turning the thread into a mini-justice campaign for the guy who birthed the modern office’s favorite frenemy.
Then came the credit wars. A reader demanded a nod to analyst Ben Evans’s 2015 line that “every person on that floor is a cell in a spreadsheet,” asking, basically: who said it first? Another commenter claimed the author actually did the reading—and the author himself popped in with a cheerful “I wrote this,” turning it into a surprise AMA moment.
But the shock twist? Excel has stans. A management consultant waded in to confess people in their world literally gush about Excel—“even at parties.” Cue memes about pivot tables and pivoting dance moves. The mood swung between nostalgia, grievance, and pure spreadsheet fandom.
Finally, the future: AI. One reader highlighted the essay’s warning—AI might supercharge organizations like Excel did, but could also “deform” them, pushing firms even deeper into optimizing numbers over people. The thread split between thrilled and terrified, with jokes about using VLOOKUP to find our humanity. The cells are alive—and arguing
Key Points
- •The article argues the electronic spreadsheet merits a prominent place in computing history alongside major milestones and pioneers.
- •It claims Microsoft Excel is the defining spreadsheet product, used by roughly one-sixth of humanity and influencing trillions of dollars in capital allocation.
- •The piece characterizes firms as information-processing systems, with managerial capacity limiting organizational size and complexity.
- •Historically, high information and coordination costs made firms small and family-based; the article begins to contrast this with the spreadsheet era’s changes.
- •The author contends spreadsheets transformed U.S. business, enabling financial engineering and Wall Street dealmaking and shifting companies toward optimizing numbers; it foreshadows similar transformations from AI.