# The Painful Foundations for Tools of Thought

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## Metadata
- Author: [[Published]]
- Full Title: The Painful Foundations for Tools of Thought
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://thedavincistoat.com/the-painful-foundations-for-tools-of-thought/

## Highlights
- An important point is how initial choices impact future development. In Excel Never Dies, Packy McCormick writes how Lotus was the industry leader in spreadsheets by a huge margin. Microsoft's spreadsheet didn't take off, not until they rebuilt from scratch with a fundamental change - instead of recalculating every cell each time a cell changed, it recalculated only the affected cells. That gave it a huge speed and performance advantage.