The spreadsheet that helped remake Wall Street

“You will be hard-pressed to find a true admirer of Excel,” writes David Oks (who I first noticed as one of the Gravel Teens and is now at a16z, truly an ideological evolution for our time). But Oks is, if not an admirer, then surely a believer that Excel and predecessors like VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 are inventions of deep historical importance. The most intriguing part of his argument is the claim that the rise of finance in the 1980s, particularly leveraged buyouts, was driven in large measure by the dawn of the spreadsheet. Before, “analyzing a single company would take weeks”; now it might take a few hours, and your model of that company could be amended in seconds. I’m not fully convinced (is the spreadsheet a driver of financialization or did financialization provide a larger market that spurred better spreadsheets?) but it’s an intriguing case study of the ways in which a particular technology’s diffusion can help reshape the economy, or perhaps solidify a reshaping already occurring.