pete_nic

Can it calculate words per minute too? That would be helpful.

> Imagine building an entire business that ceases to be profitable as soon as you can't spy on users.

>I wish we could do the same thing to Google.

You’re assuming Google’s core business would not exist without spying on users and I disagree. You can run a search business and still protect privacy, this is DuckDuckGo’s whole model. This is a fundamental difference between a search product and a social product.

VisiCalc was conceived in 1978, before the internet and all the data that comes with it. Excel has had to catch up with these developments and is finally doing a good job with it.

This is a great idea but the list seems incomplete. For example, where are the email marketing tools? Mailchimp / Intuit, Convetkit, SendFox, and so many more. There are many other markets / verticals not covered here.

In this context I’m interpreting DSL to mean “domain-specific language”

> Excel may be the most influential software ever built.

I believe this to be true in business. Other tech may be more widely used eg “email” but the software is created by a variety of different companies (Google, Microsoft).

I signed up for a Codeblog! The Captcha making me pick photos of traffic lights and cross walks to verify my humanity feels like the antithesis of what this article and product is trying to do.

One use case where this does not work: when attempting to learn if someone understood you properly. I find myself asking short, direct questions, often in a managerial capacity, to confirm that other people have the correct understanding. Making a statement and then asking an individual “do you understand?” does not suffice to confirm if someone has the correct understanding.

I feel like a more appropriate name would be “write first, then build”. “Documentation” reminds the product managers and engineers of corporate-y documents like release notes. The “documentation” described is more of a fluid collection of ideas than what we would consider “documentation”. I have found this to be true - “Writing is a way of finding out”.

>If you won’t or can’t talk to customers then at least make the thing simple. The simpler something is, the more people will use it.

Great advice

Good point, I’m sure more exist today and will be created in the future.

Google is a large, horizontal platform. My intuition is the next Google killers will be specific to verticals, health comes up on HN a lot. All that to say, if I were yep I would focus on search that avoids big, corporate, SEO stuff and connects users with thoughtful, small creators. I would not focus on commerce eg film, as it’s a crowded vertical full of Google, Shopify, Etsy, and other large e-commerce players.

> We believe the best way to protect user data is to not have it in the first place

I like the exchange of value that comes from paying money for a service. With free products from companies like Google you do not pay for the service and there is no exchange of value. This results in the myriad of HN threads discussing how Google Docs did them wrong (locked out, privacy violation, etc.)

> Excel is cheap and and you can find it everywhere.