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Alan Kay's answer: One good answer is “find out how Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston did the original spreadsheet Visicalc on the 8-bit micro Apple II”. Another approach is that the abstraction of a spreadsheet is simple, so make a prototype using any language that can make instances. This will ru...

Garrick Saito's answer: Initially, it took about three years or so to release the first version of Excel. The first lead developer of Excel, Doug Klunder, was hired by Microsoft in 1981. The first version of Excel (for Mac) was released in 1984. Given the product has been undergoing continuous ...

Brad Yundt's answer: How does any general purpose, mature product develop into a market leader and maintain its position in the top spot? It takes a lot of hard work by the product team to identify the features needed by customers, make them discoverable and easy to use. Furthermore, that hard wo...

Brad Yundt's answer: In 1988, my employer bought a copy of Excel version 2.8. It ran in a run-time version of Windows, which means you launched Windows just to run that one app, then closed it when you were done. I saw that Excel could add, subtract, multiply and divide—but I could do that on my ...

Brad Yundt's answer: Microsoft already had a spreadsheet product called Multiplan when work started on Excel. Lotus 1–2–3 dominated the market, and Excel was intended to take back marketshare from Lotus. Doug Klunder (lead developer), Jabe Blumenthal (program manager), Charles Simonyi and Bill G...

These costly mistakes remind me of the importance of careful spreadsheet auditing.