2009 marks the 30-year anniversary of the now-ubiquitous spreadsheet program. And society as a whole has deteriorated ever since its invention. It was the spreadsheet that triggered the PC revolution, with VisiCalc the original culprit. Can anyone say that we've actually benefited from its invention? Look around: I think we've suffered.

In fact, the spreadsheet has resulted in the rise of the once-lowly accountant/bean counter to a position of influence—and often the executive suite. How often in years past—the pre-spreadsheet era, that is—did an accountant take over a company? When and why did the CFO become a title? These people, at best, were once known as comptrollers.

The spreadsheet became a sword, and the accountants knew how to wield it.

And yes, while all the pundits and visionaries talk about business intelligence and modern practices and this and that, where's the evidence of improvement in the way business runs or works? Cars are shoddy, consumer goods are junk. Toxic substances are in the food supply. Lead is in toys. Most of what we buy is made cheaply elsewhere. At every level of the business scene today, some bean counter does a what-if calculation before making the decisions. The spineless CEO worries about what the shareholders would think if he disagreed with what the spreadsheet and the CFO told him to do. To make him feel better, the board will give the CEO a fat bonus for saving money.

The what-if society has marched forward with little actual regard for the customer. If the customer has a complaint, she can call someone in India—someone doing customer support there because the spreadsheet told the company it could save 1 cent a year on phone costs. There's no way this idea would have evolved without spreadsheets.

By letting a program designed for accountants tell you what to do and what to think, you end up with an economic meltdown. The mechanism itself is flawed. Nobody ever wants to talk about the flaw with spreadsheets, do they? Most spreadsheets are, in fact, fiction, or even fantasy.

This is what caused the mortgage crisis: Spreadsheets instead of people were making decisions on loans. Soon these loans were wrapped up into neat financial packages all based on spreadsheet accounting. Brokers gave these packages high, triple-A financial ratings because the spreadsheet told them to. All spreadsheets, except the most mundane, are flawed in one way or another. You guess what the growth rate might be. You guess at the future cost of goods. You play what-if until you get what you want. There's a lot of guessing games played with spreadsheets. This is a flaw.

The Enron scam and the more recent oil price scam were both developed with spreadsheet modeling. "What if we could fix prices?" they asked. Click, click, click. Wow!

So this is the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet and the subsequent rise of the accountant—the guy calling the shots and doing the deals. This class of people, once known for their meekness and wonkery, has become so powerful that they have managed to protect their common incompetence (see Enron, MCI, and Madoff, among other screw-up examples) by instituting Sarbanes-Oxley, essentially a law that protects them in any situation that involves them.

I don't blame any of these folks for taking advantage of the spreadsheet and the evolution of what-if. But why give them the keys to the car when you knew they couldn't drive? Look around and see what's happened. You can thank the spreadsheet for all of this junk. Happy birthday.

More John C. Dvorak:
• The 30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet App
• Summarizing the Death Throes of 2008
• Retro Computing and the Cloud
• The Wireless Conundrum
• Why Has Google Demanded a "Fast Lane"?
• more

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