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