A deep dive into the history of Excel, how it inspired early no-code practitioners of programming, its impact on B2B SaaS market and lessons from its resilience
The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies … This week's Not Boring is brought to you by ... Michael Bolton Tweets: @thmcmahon , @jones206 , @ichbingisele , @peteskomoroch , @jmvara , @albertbridgecap , and @nathanwaters Tweets: Thomas McMahon / @thmcmahon : Great long article on why excel is arguably the most important software of all time. https://www.notboring.co/... Brian Jones / @jones206 : Been using Steve Job's “Bicycle for the Mind” as inspiration with the Excel team for years now. I love Excel... it's an extension of our mind and helps us make better decisions faster. Loved seeing that same perspective in this article: https://www.notboring.co/... @msexcel #Excel Gisele Navarro / @ichbingisele : “If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today.” ~ @packyM https://www.notboring.co/... Pete Skomoroch / @peteskomoroch : Excel Never Dies: https://www.notboring.co/... Inspired by Excel products Figma, Roam, Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, Notion are “flexible enough for non-target users to use (I love using @figmadesign although I'm terrible at it) but endlessly challenging & rewarding for the target group.” https://twitter.com/... Juan M. Vara / @jmvara : Fantastic overview of Excel's twofold influence on the #NoCode landscape: a generation of task-specific “unbundling excel” tools, and the new generation of flexible “inspired by excel” tools. https://www.notboring.co/... Drew Dickson / @albertbridgecap : “The true Excel user secretly believes that people using any other spreadsheet program have to be, in some sense, kidding.” A fun one for Excel nerds like me out there. https://www.notboring.co/... Nathan Waters / @nathanwaters : Looking for #Holochain hApp ideas to build? While Excel has unbundled into 1000s of API-siloed companies, Holochain can reverse that. 1. Excel => agent-centric drag-drop UI. 2. Apps => modular interoperable zomes. https://www.notboring.co/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Not Boring's thesis is that Excel wasn't just an accounting tool — it was the first mass-market programming environment, seeding both the no-code movement behind low-code databases like Airtable and a generation of founders who copied its mental model into Figma, Roam, Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, and Notion.
The piece lands mid-arc: Slack had already been diagnosed as filling cracks between productivity apps rather than replacing them, and the 'unbundling' wave it describes has since run long enough that Excel still counts roughly 500M paying users years later — while Microsoft has begun bolting generative AI onto the same surface.
First-order effects
- The founders of no-code products like Webflow, Bubble, Zapier, and Notion are working from a template Excel proved: give non-programmers a visual grid-plus-formula model and they will build production systems without engineers.
- Microsoft gets a durable competitive story — thousands of task-specific B2B SaaS startups exist because teams outgrew spreadsheets, yet the spreadsheet itself never lost its seat at the center of those workflows.
Second-order effects
- The unbundlers now compete against their own origin: each API-siloed tool that replaced one spreadsheet tab still has to interoperate with Excel exports and imports, keeping Microsoft's format the de facto interchange standard across the SaaS stack.
- Airtable-style low-code products inherit both the audience and the sneer — professional programmers dismissed them the way they once dismissed 'spreadsheet hackers,' pushing the category to prove legitimacy through real community-built databases.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the winning position in productivity software is the general-purpose work surface that absorbs specialized tools rather than being displaced by them — the logic Microsoft is now extending by bringing GPT-4 into Excel through Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Excel's resilience suggests B2B SaaS structurally cycles through bundle, unbundle, and re-absorb around a persistent core artifact; the open question is whether AI assistants accelerate that cycle or freeze it around whichever vendor owns the surface first.
The trend: General-purpose work surfaces like the spreadsheet keep absorbing the point solutions built to replace them, and AI copilots are the next absorption layer.