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Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?

(martinalderson.com)
413 points martinald | 2 comments | 08 Dec 25 19:00 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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debo_ ◴[08 Dec 25 20:09 UTC] No.46196982[source]▶
> I'm sure every organisation has hundreds if not thousands of Excel sheets tracking important business processes that would be far better off as a SaaS app.

Far better off for who? People constantly dismiss spreadsheets, but in many cases, they are more powerful, more easily used by the people who have the domain knowledge required to properly implement calculations or workflow, and are more or less universally accessible.

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martinald ◴[08 Dec 25 20:12 UTC] No.46197023[source]▶
Author here. Of course not everything needs to be a web app. But I'm meaning a lot of core sheets I see in businesses need more structure round them.

Especially for collaboration, access controls, etc. Not to mention they could do with unit testing.

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tonyarkles ◴[08 Dec 25 20:15 UTC] No.46197053[source]▶
Counterpoint: if a small part of the process is getting tweaked, how responsive can the team responsible for these apps be? That’s the killer feature of spreadsheets for business processes: the accountants can change the accounting spreadsheets, the shipping and receiving people can change theirs, and there’s no team in the way to act as a bottleneck.

That’s also the reason that so-called “Shadow IT” exists. Teams will do whatever they need to do to get their jobs done, whether or not IT is going to be helpful in that effort.

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1. chasd00 ◴[08 Dec 25 20:20 UTC] No.46197106[source]▶
i've seen many attempts to turn a widely used spreadsheet into a webapp. Eventually, it becomes an attempt to re-implement spreadsheets. The first time something changes and the user says "well in Excel i would just do this..." the dev team is off chasing existing features of excel for eternity and the users are pissed because it takes so long and is buggy, meanwhile, excel is right there ready and waiting.
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2. thingortwo ◴[09 Dec 25 06:21 UTC] No.46201839[source]▶
I always see this point mentioned in "App VS Spreadsheet" but no one gives a concrete example. The whole point of using a "purpose" build app is to give some structure and consistency to the problem. If people are replicating spreadsheet feature then they needed "excel" to begin with since that is a purpose built tool for generalizing a lot of problems. It's like I can say well my notebook and pen is already in front of me, I can use this why would I ever bother opening an app? well because the app provides some additional value.