“How Trello Is Different”, 2012-01-06 ():
…Forgive me if I now divert into telling you a quick story about my time spent on the Microsoft Excel team way back in 1991…Everybody thought of Excel as a financial modeling application. It was used for creating calculation models with formulas and stuff. You would put in your assumptions and then calculate things like “if interest rates go up by 0.00001% next year, what percentage of Las Vegas homeowners will plunge into bankruptcy?” For example.
Round about 1993 a couple of us went on customer visits to see how people were using Excel.
We found a fellow whose entire job consisted of maintaining the “number of injuries this week” spreadsheet for a large, highly-regulated utility. Once a week, he opened an Excel spreadsheet which listed 10 facilities, containing the name of the facilities and the number 0, which indicated that were 0 injuries that week. (They never had injuries). He typed the current date in the top of the spreadsheet, printed a copy, put it in a 3-ring binder, and that was pretty much his whole, entire job. It was kind of sad. He took two lunch breaks a day. I would too, if that was my whole job.
Over the next two weeks we visited dozens of Excel customers, and did not see anyone using Excel to actually perform what you would call “calculations”. Almost all of them were using Excel because it was a convenient way to create a table. (Irrelevant sidenote: the few customers we could find who were doing calculations were banks.)
What was I talking about? Oh yeah… most people just used Excel to make lists. Suddenly we understood why Lotus Improv, which was this fancy futuristic spreadsheet that was going to make Excel obsolete, had failed completely: because it was great at calculations, but terrible at creating tables, and everyone was using Excel for tables, not calculations.
Bing! A light went off in my head.
The great horizontal killer applications are actually just fancy data structures.
Spreadsheets are not just tools for doing “what-if” analysis. They provide a specific data structure: a table. Most Excel users never enter a formula. They use Excel when they need a table. The gridlines are the most important feature of Excel, not recalc.
Word processors are not just tools for writing books, reports, and letters. They provide a specific data structure: lines of text which automatically wrap and split into pages.
PowerPoint is not just a tool for making boring meetings. It provides a specific data structure: an array of full-screen images.
Some people saw [our new SaaS web product] Trello and said, “oh, it’s Kanban boards. For developing software the agile way.” Yeah, it’s that, but it’s also for planning a wedding, for making a list of potential vacation spots to share with your family, for keeping track of applicants to open job positions, and for a billion other things. In fact Trello is for anything where you want to maintain a list of lists with a group of people.
There are millions of things that need that kind of data structure, and there hasn’t been a great “list-of-list” app before Trello. (There have been outliners, but outlines are, IMHO, one of the great dead ends in UI design: so appealing to programmers, yet so useless to civilians).
Once you get into Trello, you’ll use it for everything. I use about 30 Trello boards regularly, and I use them with everyone in my life, from the APs (Aged Parents), with whom I plan vacations, with every team at work, and just about every project I’m involved in.
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