Re: Adding structure, à la "multidimensional spread sheets"

[Jonathan DePeri <jonathan deperi gmail com>]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2010 at 1:49 AM, Andreas Guelzow <aguelzow pyrshep ca> wrote:
> "but it died out" & "failed apparently due to lack of popularity".
> Shouldn't this tell us something?
>
> Andreas

Worthy new ideas frequently fail to catch on for various political,
social, and economic reasons. I try to judge ideas based on their
merits, not whether they failed to become fads at particular points in
history. I don't know how profitable Quantrix is, but they've been
improving their product for the past several years at least. In any
case, though, do you deny that there are deep flaws in the
unstructured approach to spreadsheet use when the spreadsheet is large
(contains many different data series) and complex (interrelates those
series in, indeed, multi-dimensional ways)?

Javelin and Lotus Improv failed in the late 80s / early 90s. Those
were early days for spreadsheets; the scale, complexity, and
pervasiveness of their use has greatly increased since then.
Personally, if it were feasible to do so I'd scarcely ever use a
traditional spreadsheet like Gnumeric again. I'd use something like
Quantrix. I say this as a professional financial analyst who uses
spreadsheets for modeling almost every day of my working life, and as
someone who recognizes the sense of adding Quantrix-like functionality
to the best existing free spreadsheet application instead of going off
and implementing it somewhere else.

Jonathan