Spreadsheets as simple ledgers? Wonderful, assuming you know about using ranges and how to use $ (or not) as part of reference statements.
Even that level of complexity seems like wizardry to most office drones.
However a spreadsheet is weak compared to a true relational logic engine; a modern database. Databases /have/ had the decades of refinement and are very good tools. Yet for those tools you kind of nail it. Specialists are required to correctly harness that potential.
In the UK my national insurance contributions are about %8 but that does just go into the general tax pool and is not hypothecated to be spend on the NHS/health.
The history of early flight and car technologies reminds me very much of the early computer industry. In each case every other product was some crazy one-off custom job. With flight you had different approaches to control surfaces. With cars just for power you had steam (the assumed winner because people were so familiar with steam locomotives), gasoline, diesel, electric. On top of that there were flywheel powered and balanced cars, three wheelers and all sorts of crazy control systems. With computers there was also very little standardization with Apple, Tandy, Atari, Acorn, Sinclair and many others selling mutually incompatible devices. BASIC was pretty common but there were many variations and I remember one home micro coming with Forth.
I wonder if there are any other good examples of technologies that had explosions in different technical approaches to the problem before becoming more standardised?
