Honestly Microsoft could’ve had a killer product with Access if they made an easier pipeline from Excel -> Access -> Win32 application/webpage with an SQL backend. Like there is some of that pipeline present, but if Microsoft actually followed that vision, created easy wizards for each step that your average office drone can complete and marketed the shit out of it, they could completely own business processes instead of a cottage industry of spreadsheets turned SAAS apps for every niche usecase that could’ve been handled by a common database frontend.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.
Honestly Microsoft could’ve had a killer product with Access if they made an easier pipeline from Excel -> Access -> Win32 application/webpage with an SQL backend. Like there is some of that pipeline present, but if Microsoft actually followed that vision, created easy wizards for each step that your average office drone can complete and marketed the shit out of it, they could completely own business processes instead of a cottage industry of spreadsheets turned SAAS apps for every niche usecase that could’ve been handled by a common database frontend.
On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets
Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.
You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.