So, first of all, I love Excel. I think Excel is the most incredible piece of shrinkwrapped software ever sold. I often joke that I don't have any tattoos but if I got one, it would be the excel logo. At least, everyone thinks I'm joking: I'm actually somewhat serious.

My argument is not that these tools are bad, or that there's absolutely no market, or that it's fundamentally impossible. My argument is that this market represents a trap to the kind of people who start technology companies: it looks very shiny and appealing to people with the exact psychological makeup to launch technology companies, and that makes it harder for them to see the challenges.

For every Excel there are a 1,000 Lotus Improvs. For every Ruby on Rails there are a thousand Google App Inventors. For every Hypercard there are a thousand Runtime Revolutions. For every IFTTT there are a thousand Yahoo! Pipes (and I'm not really sure if its fair to call IFTTT 'successful').

The linking feature of technology entrepreneurs is they are people who see problems everywhere that can be solved with technology. They are also generally 'generalizers' or 'lumpers' (which leads to other antipatterns: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html). These are necessary preconditions to being successful in this line of work: identifying problems, classifying them as tractable with existing or adjacent-possible technologies, generalizing disparate-looking issues into something solveable with one approach.

But almost no one else thinks like this. The stereotypical tech startup founder's favorite toy as a kid was lego. Now, lego is a popular toy. But most people when they get legos build whatever was in the picture on the box. Lego almost went out of business around 2000. They turned it around by getting aggressive on IP development and licensing that does some of the imagining for you.

Let's say you could invent the ultimate 'non-technical person app-maker' tool. It's a magic helmet. You put it on, imagine the software feature by feature, and then it 's in your Dropbox, seconds later. Most people would have absolutely no use for this helmet. This becomes really clear if you do a lot of consulting. People have the most insane descriptions of their problems and really have no idea what they need. It's sort of like Henry Ford's "if I'd asked the customers they would've said they want a faster horse". In technology we've seen this a million times. The most famous examples are probably why didn't GE or IBM own the photocopying industry, or why didn't IBM own RDBMSs before Oracle got out there. The classic explanation of this is the Clayton Christensen model: the new product threatens existing revenue streams and the company's internal culture protects them.

As a quick aside, I think there are a lot of issues with this bit of Silicon Valley religious orthodoxy: The Innovator's Dilemma i think has a lot less explanatory power than we generally accept. There are many, many markets where successive waves of technical development been captured by market leaders. The largest shipping company in the world by TEU capacity _or_ ship count is A.P. Moller-Maersk Group. Founder Moller-Maersk bought his first ship in 1886. This is the ship: http://media-cache-ec0.pinimg.com/736x/48/68/db/4868dbcbadb6... Not only did these guys survive the crazy waves of disruption that have hit the shipping business recently, they started with a break bulk _steamship_. Diesel, containerization, automated ship management...they're the dominant player in international shipping. 130 years later.

IBM owned 100% of the technology, theory, and experience in the RDBMS world then. They could have charged whatever they wanted for it. It was no threat at all to their existing database business. It could have expanded it above or below. Same with photocopying. IBM didn't have a large segment of...crummier...document duplication?

The problem in these cases is the fail to understand what customers need, and to explain it to them. It's much more basic.

But it also gets at the broad Silicon Valley disdain for 'marketing'. Marketing is both incredibly difficult and incredibly important. Packaging up a new, abstract concept in a digestible way that makes people change behavior is as important to driving the adoption of a new technological solution to an old problem as engineering.

Anyway, I'm getting really off-track and burning up my Sunday afternoon here.

The short version of my point is: It's easier to make non-technical people technical than it is to make non-problem-solvers problem solvers.

It is _insane_ what 'non-technical' people manage to get done with Excel, if they have the correct problem-solvey mind. Physics majors who end up as analysts at investment banks and build incredibly complex modeling and information-management tools in Excel.

But if you are the kind of person who can clearly identify an issue and envision a reasonable set of tools to solve it, there are tons of technical people around who can help you solve it, and if you want to learn yourself, its generally not that hard to get started.

The typical technology entrepreneur gets a job doing _literally anything_ and is surrounded by things that make them think "jesus christ! I can't believe we're still doing that X way! We should have a system that takes the foos from the foo queue and automatically bar-izes them..." And they are limited by the speed at which they can build software. Their implementation speed can not possibly keep pace with the tons of ideas they have! But imagine if...instead of solving the specific problem with the foo queue...they solved _the problem of solving problems_! Then they wouldn't need to build a messy salesforce to address the foo queues in this small backwards industry, they would just use a no-touch sales strategy to sell directly to teams who will bring the domain experience to solve any of these problems themselves!