Podcast Summary: "Big Take Bonus: Why We Can’t Quit Microsoft Excel"

Podcast: Everybody’s Business (Bloomberg & iHeartPodcasts)
Hosts/Guests: Max Chafkin, Stacey Vanek Smith, Dina Bass, Sarah Holder
Date: December 10, 2025
Episode Focus: Exploring the enduring power and cultural ubiquity of Microsoft Excel, from its origins to its “esports” moment, the strategies that fueled its dominance, and why it remains indispensable despite AI and Google Sheets.

1. Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the fascinating world of Microsoft Excel, examining its 40-year legacy, surprising cultural impact, and why it continues to dominate business and society. Guests discuss Excel’s evolution from a humble spreadsheet to an indispensable corporate tool, its outsized cultural presence, and the challenges it faces from tech rivals and AI. Through stories, expert insights, and even a look at "spreadsheet esports," the episode showcases the software’s unique place at the intersection of technology, business, and human behavior.

2. Key Discussion Points and Insights

The Spectacle of Excel: The World Championships

• Esports for Spreadsheets

  • The hosts describe the Excel World Championship, painting a tongue-in-cheek picture of “celebrity” spreadsheet wizards entering the arena like pro athletes.
    • Dina Bass (02:11): “Everybody runs out to cheers, you know, befitting their celebrity and skill in the world of spreadsheets.”
  • Excel competitions have commentators, countdowns, and speedy data modeling akin to video game speedrunning.
    • Dina Bass (02:55): “Have you ever seen, like, video game speedrunning where people try to finish, like, a Mario game as quickly as possible…?”

• Excel in Mainstream Work

  • What these pros do isn’t much different from millions of workers worldwide: inputting numbers into grids, using formulas, and moving at breakneck mouse/keyboard speed.
    • Sarah Holder (03:22): “…what millions of office workers…do every day, sit at a computer and put numbers into cells.”

Why Excel Rules the (Business) World

• Cultural & Corporate Omnipresence

  • Excel powers companies, nonprofits, and institutions around the globe, quietly underpinning operations everywhere.
    • Max Chafkin (04:43): “Excel is like…probably the most important piece of software that has ever been created. Basically, it runs almost every single business…”

• Mixed Emotions: Love, Hate, and Drudgery

  • People’s feelings about Excel are intense and contradictory—fondness for its capability, frustration at its drabness and centrality in “boring capitalist grunt work.”
    • Dina Bass (06:15): “Excel just symbolizes drudgery, right?”
    • Max Chafkin (06:33): “It’s also an embodiment of the things we hate most about capitalism…If you get laid off, guaranteed you were laid off because of a cell on an Excel spreadsheet.”
  • The “Wall-E in Excel” anecdote captures both its power and the lengths people go to cope with Excel-heavy jobs.
    • Max Chafkin (07:06): “The most popular [Reddit] post of all time is somebody explaining how to watch Wall-E inside of Microsoft Excel…”

• Excel Lovers and Power Users

  • Despite gripes, strong communities have emerged. From social media influencers and Reddit forums to top executives like Steve Ballmer tracking every aspect of life in Excel.
    • Max Chafkin (08:20): “Most people think it’s pretty weird. I keep a spreadsheet of how I spend my hours…[Ballmer] showed us all these, like, insane ways he was using it.”
    • Dina Bass (09:03): “His entire brain is just a series of endless spreadsheets.”

The Origin Story: 1970s to World Domination

• From VisiCalc to Lotus to Excel

  • Excel’s lineage traces back to VisiCalc, created in the late 1970s, which helped start the personal computing revolution as people realized the power of digital tables.
    • Max Chafkin (09:47): “We spoke to the inventor of VisiCalc, this guy named Dan Bricklin…He created…this rough hewn spreadsheet called VisiCalc for the Apple II.”

• Microsoft’s Breakthrough and Strategy

  • Microsoft tried and failed with “MultiPlan,” then pivoted to the Mac with Project Odyssey, which became Excel. Its user-friendly approach helped accelerate personal/family-sized computing.
  • The secret weapon: bundling Excel with other Microsoft apps in the 1990s (Microsoft Office), making it nearly impossible for companies to switch without huge disruption.
    • Max Chafkin (12:43): “If you’re trying to understand how did Microsoft sort of use Excel to propel itself to this dominance…in one word, it’s bundling.”

• Cloud Era Lock-In

  • Today, Microsoft 365 packages everything together—once you’re in, there’s no picking and choosing.
    • Dina Bass (13:11): “…you can’t take those pieces apart. I had a CIO tell me…his CEO…said, look, I personally don’t use Excel…Don’t pay them for Excel for me. And the CIO just looked at his CEO like, you sweet summer child, that is not a thing.”

Competition & Technological Threats

• Google Sheets – More Rival Than Replacement

  • Google’s spreadsheet ambitions were expected to dethrone Excel, but widespread adoption in schools hasn’t triggered a workplace migration.
    • Dina Bass (16:59): “…we thought Sheets was going to…and just Google’s Office competitors in general were going to be the thing that took out Excel, but it just never really happened. …When you hit the workforce you get assigned your Office license.”

• AI: Hype and Limitations

  • New AI-powered spreadsheet tools claim to be challengers, but most are either Excel clones or assistants—sometimes producing only Excel files.
  • Fundamental issues with AI (like basic arithmetic or transparent reasoning) mean spreadsheets still do some things better.
    • Max Chafkin (18:11): “AI is not great at math…Large language models are not awesome at computation…AI models are really bad at telling you why they arrived at a given answer. And that is a thing that spreadsheets are awesome at.”
    • Dina Bass (19:36): “What people are trying to do is not reinvent the underlying spreadsheet layer…basically create a copilot or an assistant that works on top of the data in the spreadsheet…”

• The Enduring Table: Why We Can't Quit

  • Excel’s format (the grid) is time-tested, intuitive, and almost primal in its appeal. Maybe it’s not just inertia—maybe spreadsheets are fundamental to how we make sense of numbers and the world.
    • Max Chafkin (20:13): “Maybe there is something fundamental to a spreadsheet that…we wouldn’t actually want to process data in another way. …Maybe it’s how all of our brains work in some sense.”
  • Microsoft’s strategy mirrors this: instead of replacing Excel with AI, its goal is to make every user as skilled as a world champion, with AI as a Copilot.
    • Max Chafkin (20:29): “Microsoft strategy is not to make an AI version of Excel. It’s just to have like an assistant inside of Excel…they want to make you as good as the world champion.”

3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Why Excel Inspires Such Intense Feelings

  • Dina Bass (06:15): “Excel just symbolizes drudgery, right?”
  • Max Chafkin (06:33): “It’s also an embodiment of the things that we hate most about capitalism. ...If you get laid off, like, guaranteed you were laid off because of a cell on an Excel spreadsheet.”

• Steve Ballmer's Spreadsheeter Brain

  • Max Chafkin (08:20): “Most people think it’s pretty weird. I keep a spreadsheet of how I spend my hours. When we interviewed Steve Ballmer, he was like…Then he showed us all these insane ways he was using it.”
  • Dina Bass (09:03): “His entire brain is just a series of endless spreadsheets.”

• Cheating the System

  • Max Chafkin (07:06): “The most popular post of all time is somebody explaining how to watch Wall-E inside of Microsoft Excel to trick their company’s workplace software…”

• On Bundling and Enterprise Lock-in

  • Dina Bass (13:11): “The CIO just looked at his CEO like, you sweet summer child, that is not a thing.”

• AI’s Limits

  • Max Chafkin (18:11): “Part of the problem is that these AI tools are really just either copycats of Excel…or they’re just little pieces that are designed to work with Excel…”

• On the Timelessness of the Spreadsheet

  • Max Chafkin (20:13): “Maybe there is something fundamental to a spreadsheet…Like I said, people have been using tables of numbers for a very long time.”
  • Sarah Holder (20:27): “Yeah, if it was good enough for Mesopotamia…”

4. Key Timestamps

• 01:43 – Introduction to the Excel World Championship and the spectacle of “spreadsheet esports”
• 04:43 – The case for Excel’s title as “most important software ever”
• 06:33 – Why Excel is tied to capitalism and mixed emotions at work
• 07:06 – The “Wall-E in Excel” story—Excel’s unexpected power and cultural meta
• 08:20–09:22 – Steve Ballmer’s life tracked via spreadsheet
• 09:47–12:33 – The VisiCalc origin story and Microsoft’s breakthrough
• 12:43–13:54 – How Microsoft Office’s bundling strategy ensured dominance
• 14:01 – How critical Excel was to Microsoft’s rise
• 16:59 – Google Sheets: education success, but not a real business rival
• 18:11 – The promise and limits of AI as an Excel challenger
• 20:13–21:30 – The philosophical case for why spreadsheets endure (brain wiring, archetypal tool)

5. Conclusion

In this lively, accessible, and occasionally irreverent discussion, the hosts make a compelling case that Microsoft Excel is not just a business tool, but a cultural artifact—an accidental icon of modern life. Its enduring reign isn’t just about technical lock-in; it reflects something deep about how we process information and organize our world. Despite much-hyped threats from AI and younger tech upstarts, the grid endures—and may just outlast us all.

For Excel fans, business history buffs, or anyone who’s ever lost a few hours in a spreadsheet, this episode offers both insight and some much-needed levity.