Excel. If you work in corporate America, that word either inspires laser-focused productivity or pure dread. Over the last 40 years, the spreadsheet software has become synonymous with the best — and worst — of late-stage capitalism. It’s seeped into popular culture and, along the way, made Microsoft one of the world’s most valuable companies.But in a world of AI and new competition where Excel=Sum(39+1), can it stay on top? From the Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Dina Bass and Businessweek’s Max Chafkin join host Sarah Holder to track the rise and challenges ahead for one of the most ubiquitous programs around.
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Episode Transcript
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
This week in Las Vegas, a group of elite players
faced off to compete for a coveted world Championship title.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Everyone seems to know the score.
Speaker 1 (00:22):
It really does feel like you're, you know, at Madison
Square Garden watching the nick starting five run out.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
What I've seen Andrew Dewey.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
With a little bit less excitement.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Maybe the competitors enter the arena through a tunnel pro
sports style.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Everybody runs out to cheers, you know, befitting their celebrity
and skill. In the world of spreadsheets, it's the sounds
World Championship.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
Who is going away? Yep, that's right, We're talking about
the World Championship of Microsoft XL. Dina Bass, who's covered
Microsoft for decades and now writes about AI, says since
the first competition in twenty twelve, Microsoft excelling has become
(01:10):
something of a serious esport. All right, audience, we're gonna
need your help. We're gonna count it down, We're gonna
start it five, let's go. Fuck it even has commentators.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
Three two. What have you ever seen like video game
speed running where people try to finish like a Mario
game as quickly as possible. That also has that like
fla by play commentary, because otherwise, like normal people wouldn't
understand what's going on. They sort of give them something
to solve, and you're watching it, but it moves so
(01:39):
quickly you kind of don't know what you're watching.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
The right side of the screen as well.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
If you're wondering what's flashing on the right side, there
those are his keys and his shortcuts.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
So obviously at this level, what you're watching these pro
spreadsheeters do isn't too different from what millions of office
workers around the country do every day, sit at a
computer and put numbers into selling.
Speaker 3 (02:00):
The genesis of this competition was financial modeling.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
That's Max Chafkin, who writes for BusinessWeek and co hosts
the magazine's podcast Everybody's Business.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
So it used to be a competition to see who
is the best at financial modeling, which is of course
how most people use Microsoft Excel, and they changed it
a couple of years back to make it more accessible.
So now what they model our games. But at the
end of the day, viewers are like looking at a spreadsheet,
like a normal Excel spreadsheet with and there's like a
little little mini screen inside like an inset screen, like
(02:34):
on a video game where you see the athlete you know,
clicking the mouse and like and manipulating the you know,
the cells.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
It's not exactly an NBA game, but watch an Excel
wizard input functions at warp speed and your pulse might
start racing, which is not the kind of emotion people
usually associate with Excel. Somehow, despite its association with badly
lit offices and boring capitalist gruntwork, Excel has become one
(03:03):
of the most influential computer programs in the world, and
not just in the world of esports.
Speaker 3 (03:10):
Excel is like the most I think it's like probably
the most important piece of software that has ever been created.
Basically like it runs almost every single business, it runs,
every single nonprofit. It runs like any big organization you
can think about is in some sense operating on Microsoft
(03:31):
Excel because it's the dominant spreadshet platform.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
I'm Sarah Holder and this is the big take from
Bloomberg News Today on the show, Microsoft Excel is now
forty years old in an age of AI and Google Sheets,
Can it last another forty? For many people? Microsoft Excel's
classic green and white grid and it's seemingly infinite scroll
(04:00):
of columns and rows bring up strong feelings.
Speaker 3 (04:04):
How do you feel about microsophic self? I love using it.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
This is something our producer David Fox discovered walking around
New York City's Bryant Park during a lunch break.
Speaker 3 (04:14):
Do you have a favorite XL formula or function?
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Oh, my gosh, I mean it's really basic, but I
love account IF or account A X look up HTA
is a good one.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
I use a lot of advance statements and like being
able to like coffy things, you know, when you just
drag the cursor down. I mean, if you're really a pro,
you don't use the mouse, but I will use the
mouse just for efficiency.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
Bloomberg's Dina Bass and Max Chafkin say those kinds of
reactions are pretty typical.
Speaker 1 (04:42):
Excel just symbolizes drudgery, right. It's every workplace movie stereotype.
You know, it's the office in Slough, it's office space
in your Nine Bosses. The user interface is dull. It
hasn't really changed much.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Also, and this was suggested to me by Mitch kap Or,
who's a spreadsheet pioneer. But it's also an embodiment of
the things that we hate most about capitalism, right, Like
Excel is about cutting costs, it's about optimizing if you
get laid off, like guaranteed you were laid off because
(05:20):
of a cell on an Excel spreadsheet. And I think
we all like kind of understand that it's like the
one fun parts of capitalism.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Right, Like we're all just numbers in an Excel file
exactly day.
Speaker 3 (05:32):
I mean, I think for many people, including many power users,
it's like it is like a thing that they hate
and a thing that they also appreciate, the thing for
me that kind of epitomize this. There's a very active
community on Reddit for Excel. The most popular post of
all time is somebody explaining how to watch Wall E
(05:55):
inside of Microsoft Excel in order to trick their companies
workplace software into thinking that they're using Excel when they're
in fact watching a movie.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So they're on Excel for like an hour and forty
five minutes, but they're just I love.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
It because it totally epitomizes. First of all, this software
is insanely powerful, like you can add up numbers, but
you can also run full on programs, and yet like
with all of that power, what you're doing is getting
around the fact that you have to use the software
in the first place.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
There are something like five hundred million paying Excel users
out there, according to Max and Dena's calculations based on
Microsoft's public disclosures. Those users range from Excel social media
influencers to employees at the US Department of War Finance, guys,
college students, and people like Steve Balmer.
Speaker 3 (06:46):
Most people think it's pretty weird. I keep a spreadsheet
of how I spend my hours. When we interviewed Steve Balmer,
he was like, oh yeah, I mean, like, I'm not
really an Excel guy. And then he showed us all these,
like all the insane ways that he was using it.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Steve Balmer headed Microsoft sales in the eighties and went
on to become the company's CEO. He now owns the
Los Angeles Clippers.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Okay, can you guys see that? Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
He showed Max and Dina the Excel spreadsheet he uses
to organize his life.
Speaker 3 (07:18):
So this is kind of my spreadsheet.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
Twenty five budget, twenty twenty five actual year to date?
Speaker 1 (07:25):
How many nights in my way from home? What nights
were they? I've known Steve Balmer for more than two decades.
His entire brain is just a series of endless spreadsheets.
That's the way he thinks.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
I of course asked him, like, where's the bathroom time go?
He's like, Oh, that's personal time.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
Everything nine to five I keep track of and anything
clippers at night. Extreme as it may be, Balmer's spreadsheet
habit speaks to how Excel has morph from a computational
tool to a ubiquitous part of people's everyday lives. But
how did the digital spreadsheet revolution start? Max says it
(08:06):
begins in the nineteen seventies, not with Microsoft or Excel,
but with a program called VisiCalc.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
We spoke to the inventor of iCal, this guy named
Dan Bricklin, who dreamed it up while he was in
a business school class. There are things that look like spreadsheets,
you know, from ancient Mesopotamia. But like he was like,
wouldn't it be great if you could have one of
these tables with numbers where it just calculates instantly. And
he created, with a co founder, Bob Frankston, basically this
(08:40):
kind of rough hewn spreadsheet called Visical for the Apple too.
It really was I think the thing that started the
personal computing revolution.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
At the time, computers were mostly used by universities or
large companies. They weren't in lots of people's homes or
in most people's desks at work. But big technology companies
like Microsoft, we're hoping to change that.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Microsoft's like early motto was, you know, a computer on
every desk and in every home running Microsoft software. But
the problem is you have to convince people that they
want this. Why would anybody want their own one of
these things?
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Microsoft realized that spreadsheet software could be part of that
pitch for selling more personal computers, so they decided to
take what VisiCalc pioneered and iterate on it. They started
working on a digital spreadsheet competitor. Was there a moment
when Microsoft kind of realized this could be a really
(09:39):
big deal for them as a company.
Speaker 3 (09:42):
I mean, they knew from the jump. By the time
the Excel project started in eighty three, which was originally
called Project Odyssey, spreadsheets were a thing. Like everyone knew
that there were basically like two cool things you could
do with a computer. One was we're processing like desktop publishing,
and the other is spreadsheets. So Microsoft's like frantically like
(10:03):
trying to like make their own spreadsheet and they made
they made this original one which was like a VisiCalc
knockoff called Multiplan that did not work out, and then
they started working on another knockoff, which was a Lotus knockoff.
Lotus being like, at the time, the most successful spreadsheet program,
and they made this decision which I think in retrospect
(10:24):
it looks inspired to put it on the Mac. And
not only did that help like propel the Mac, it
also ends up propelling Microsoft because spreadsheets using this kind
of graphical interface, the point and click thing, it's just
like a way more elegant version of the experience, and
(10:46):
that then sort of propels Excel to become the dominant
spreadsheet platform. And then that gets juiced by like a
ton of sort of Microsoft, you know, hard nosed business behavior.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
One of the key business strategies was selling subscriptions to
several of their software apps together as a package. That
package was called Microsoft Office.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I think if you're trying to understand, like how did
Microsoft sort of use Excel to propel itself to this dominance, Like,
in one word, it's bundling. As Microsoft evolved into the nineties,
they start making all these deals with big companies and
with computer manufacturers, so it becomes this like thing where
you can't really switch your spreadsheet without making a bunch
(11:32):
of other changes that could be potentially disruptive to your business.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
The bundle got even bigger, sort of in the cloud era,
because ultimately Microsoft winds up doing this you know, cloud
license offering where if you're a corporation, every employee gets
everything in one thing. It ends up becoming its ends
up being called Microsoft three sixty five, and you can't
take those pieces apart. And look, I had a CIO
(11:58):
tell me while I was recaring a different story about
a year ago, that his CEO was trying to figure
out how they could save money on software, and came
over to him and said, look, you know, I personally
don't use Excel. Can you go to Microsoft and you
can save some money on my license. I don't need Excel,
don't pay them for Excel for me. And the CIO
just looked at a CEO like, you, sweet summer child,
(12:18):
that that is.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Not a thing.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
With the benefit of hindsight, how important was Excel in
turning Microsoft into the company that it is today.
Speaker 3 (12:27):
I mean, I think there's no Microsoft, the four trillion
almost four trillion dollar you know, market cap company that
dominates the business software market without Excel.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
In four decades, Excel has managed to conquer the corporate
world and seep into our culture, but it's no longer
the only game in town. The challenges to Excel's dominance
that's coming up next. When Microsoft Excel was first released
(13:03):
in nineteen eighty five, it built on the work of
early digital spreadsheet programs like VisiCalc and Lotus, and pretty
much since then, Excel has been synonymous with spreadsheets, but
Bloomberg's Dina Bass says that hasn't stopped other companies from
trying to compete with it, like Google, which introduced Google
(13:24):
Sheets in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Several people we spoke to, including you know, Ray Azi,
who after his time at Lotus actually ended up at
Microsoft working on their cloud strategy, you know, said to us, Look,
you know, people thought we thought sheets was going to
and just Google's office competitors in general were going to
be the thing that you know, took out Excel, but
it just never really happened. And look, I mean Google
(13:49):
does have a number of their office competitor is particularly
strong in schools. You know, most kids. When they go
to school, they get a Chromebook and it comes with
the Google applications, and so you end up with a
generation and people that are growing up not using Office
but instead using the Google rivals. And so there has
been this question, I think for the last ten years
(14:11):
or so about what would happen when those folks hit
the workforce. But we're still really not seeing a mass
migration away from office. It seems like when you hit
the workforce, you get assigned your office license.
Speaker 2 (14:22):
So far Excel has managed to fend off its free
cloud based competitor, but now it's also confronting another big
technological shift. I have to ask what about AI? What
kind of threat does AI post to Excel?
Speaker 3 (14:39):
So if you think, like at the furthest remove, the
promise of AI is it's going to take a large
amount of data of information and allow you to ask
questions of it and get answers in an easy way.
And that's like what a spreadsheet does. And so there
are lots of potential Excel competitors. There are sort of
like AI versions of Excel. There are these kind of
(14:59):
like AI tools that are designed essentially to work with Excel,
but like part of The problem is that these AI
tools are really just either copycats of Excel, like they're
sort of just like doing exactly what Excel does, or
they're just little pieces that are designed to work with Excel.
So it's like an AI assistant that will spit out
(15:21):
a spreadsheet, but that spreadsheet ends up being an Excel file.
But then there's an other issue with AI, which is,
like AI is not great at math, like just the
like just like the most basic Excel function is like
some like add up a big long list of numbers,
and like large language models are not awesome at computation
because like they're going for approximation, not the not the
(15:43):
perfect answers. And then the other thing is AI models
are really bad at, like at telling you why they
arrived at a given answer, and that is the thing
that spreadsheets are awesome at.
Speaker 2 (15:54):
And Dina says that even some of the AI products
that are aiming to replace Excel still rely on spreadsheets
to manage their data.
Speaker 1 (16:03):
What people are trying to do is not reinvent the
underlying spreadsheet layer. It's you know, basically create a copilot
or an assistant that works on top of the data
in the spreadsheet and answers questions for you. Now, Microsoft,
of course is trying to do the same thing with
their Copilot.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
And so even if you're using an AI algorithm to
generate a spreadsheet, my guess is it's going to spit
it out and you're going to be right back and
Microsoft Excel just like your parents and maybe even your
grandparents were.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
Max says, there might be something deeper at play here,
something intangible that's kept people coming back to Excel year
after year.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Maybe there is something fundamental to a spreadsheet that like
we wouldn't actually want to process data in another way
that like, really, this is just like a table of numbers.
Like I said, people have been using tables and numbers
for a very long time.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, if it was good enough for mesopotagics.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
Yeah, it's like it's how Steve Bomber's brain works. Maybe
it's how all of our brains work in some sense.
And like the prospect of trying to reinvent that it
doesn't make that much sense, which is why, like Dina said,
like Microsoft strategy is not to make an AI version
of Excel. It's just have like an assistant inside of
Excel that and this is you know, barring the language
(17:18):
that Microsoft executives use when they talk about it, but
it's basically like, they want to make you as good
as the world champion three two.
Speaker 2 (17:26):
One, and we dine Wow.
Speaker 3 (17:31):
So you watch those world champions on TV. You're really impressed,
You're thrilled. A huge congratulations to our twenty twenty five
Microsoft Excel World Champion Deer mid Early and now you,
with the help of co pilot, can do the same
kinds of advanced modeling that they do. I don't think
it's quite there yet, but that's the that's the promise.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder.
To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access
to all of bloomberg dot com, subscribe today at Bloomberg
dot com slash Podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be
back tomorrow.
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