But the excel replacement is a 3 year IT project with a 60% chance to fail and an enormous budget. By the time it is done, the user will have forgotten what this project was even for.
Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.
Part of the promise of cloud based document solutions, to my eyes, is being able to replace "edge databases" with user-facing user-editable spreadsheets.
Drain those IT projects of risk, get moving early, with a structure that lets the user guide the data modelling... Could be a nice local minimum :)
Agree. Well, ideally you would want to give a path for non technical users to do more than spreadsheets. That was the promise of hyper-card, VBA, etc. But that's not the direction of the world anymore, quite the opposite.
Nowadays you have JS to automate Google and MS docs, but 1) Javascript is kinda warty for VBA-type users, 2) API driven javascript is less friendly than the locally-logical VBA-style access, and 3) the mental barriers to entry are much higher than older solutions to the same issues...
In theory we should be approaching data-nirvana for end users. In reality it takes a lot of tech know how to bridge those gaps in the modern Enterprise and you're getting almost no help from the big boys.
Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.