Aparna Chennapragada: preference

Transcript context

…All roads lead to GitHub. On the flip side of this question, there have been probably 5,000 startups that have tried to disrupt Excel and you guys just keep winning, so something there is working really well. That is so interesting you say that. So when I came to Microsoft, and I'm an Excel fan, so I actually had a conversation with one of the OG Excel product folks. I was like, "an, what is it about this product?" And he said a couple things that were really interesting for me that just stuck with me. One is and I said, "Hey, Excel is a proof that non-coders also have to program. " Programming is really powerful and it's the tool that gives all of the non-coders a really powerful programming ability, and I thought that was just really striking. And then the second thing that I found out super cool, I don't know if you know this, but I didn't know at least before two years ago that there are these amazing Excel championships like World Excel championships where you see folks who can do just magic. And to me, I think the insight here is also that some tools are harder to learn. Perhaps in the beginning there's friction in terms of learning, but great to use. So it's a very good case of, hey, the learning curve initially, the one-time learning curve might be tricky, but it is because there's so much power and depth in the tool. That's so interesting. I never thought of Excel as a programming language, but it makes sense and I feel like once you get used to it and this is just the way things work, you're kind of stuck there and everything else has to basically copy that model, which is hard to be as good.…

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