Re: Two bad examples
This is exactly the point I was going to make!
Excel's position as a "killer app" is more like being the lowest common denominator. It's flexible enough to let non technical people do practically anything they wish and I'd argue that this often harms "productivity"
For example I'll be asked to take an arbitrary list of tasks or goals written in Excel by a project manager, and manually add related ticket numbers (e.g. JIRA) and their status. It's then expected that these statuses be manually synchronised periodically with the real tickets. It's pointless and stupid but the powers that be don't see anything wrong with it.
Got a list of project issues? Excel
Want to manage a list of hardware assets? Excel
Want to draw a crude block diagram? Excel
List of team members/contacts? Excel
Heck a friend of mine who's a true power user and did national statistics for a living, ended up making a garden plan in Excel because it was just the tool he knows best!
In my own work environment Excel + OneDrive can't even handle the most basic synchronisation as still doesn't seem to support any kind of collaborative editing...
Create a new excel file and save it. Immediately there's a warning that the Server version of the file has changed and would I like to keep my version or the server version!?!?! It's a new file for Christ's sake!
And then people decide to send spreadsheets to multiple people by email for editing so then you end up with multiple edited forks of the original file. In some cases the owner of the file will then spend hours copying and pasting bits from the various edits into the master version...
It's a hideous mess and I can only hope the the "killer" AI / AGI / LLM application is something significant better and more meaningful than email spam and crappy "creative" uses of Excel.