The essence of the computer’s power in the modern age is the ability to take a previously time-consuming task, and to automate it. Often not just automate, but speed up, and reduce the chance of errors. For decades now this power has been open to all thanks, mainly, to the existence of the spreadsheet. From early data entry systems on mainframes through VisiCalc, Lotus and of course Microsoft Excel then onward to modern web based tools like Google Sheets & Airtable the spreadsheet has granted far more people the ability to record data & process it - magnitudes more than the number of computer programmers out there.
In recent years the spreadsheet has been joined by it’s distributed equivalent, the API toolsets of If That then This, Zapier, Segment etc. that promise to stitch together sets of proprietary tools via their individual interfaces into powerful distributed automation systems for businesses. But for every company that’s discarded their custom software in favour of getting smart non-programmers to stitch together a set of general purpose software, there’s a business creaking under the weight of managing a spreadsheet, trapped between its complexity and the high cost of building it out as custom software.
I call this dissonance between general purpose software and custom software the spreadsheet gap