Indeed, the worker's increased productivity far overshadowed the cost of both a microcomputer and the software. Thus, it was advantageous to businesses to provide such facilities to their workers who had need for them. The time and effort needed to learn to use a spreadsheet is reasonable relative to the available time and capabilities of many businesspeople. In some sense, the compelling application embodies some of the knowledge of a field, so that the user can more rapidly gain a functional level of skill, as compared to a person who is learning how to do bookkeeping and accounting tasks by hand. It is important to make two points here.
Intrinsic motivation makes an application compelling.
Second, a compelling application empowers its user to do things that are not readily done without the computer system. I suspect that most of us have not thought much about how the spreadsheet and other business software has changed business education. Essentially every high school in the country has replaced its typewriter labs with computer labs. Students now learn keyboarding instead of typing. They learn to represent and solve bookkeeping and accounting problems using spreadsheets and other accounting software.