Excel is great until it you need to do something that takes up more space than a single screen. Then it isn't.

Sending sqlite databases to the users which they can interact with using both sql and a viewer is where it's at.

The SaaS I am now working for is a react app + some fancy intelligence.

We are not front-end people, so the app is built with the expectation that people will be doing their filtering, searching and using the intelligence we provide, but in their home turf (excel).

Our app also lets users "track" certain events, and we do not use push notifications, rather we respect our user's attention and email them a short summary, and link to a csv that they can use!

That immediately made me think of the digital TV switchover. The elderly father of a friend of mine would spend much of his time in front of the TV, and could operate it without assistance, thanks to the simple 1:1 mapping between buttons and functions.

After the digital switchover, there was now a set-top box, and electronic program guide and three-figure channel numbers thrown into the mix, as well as stateful aspect such as whether the TV was set to AV or still trying to use its now-obsolete tuner.

For someone with poor eyesight, limited feeling in his fingers and limited ability (and admittedly willingness, too) to build a mental model of how the menus worked and how they can be navigated, it spelled the end of his unsupervised access to TV.

The big difference for me between database-query-driven and algorithmically-driven is that the latter makes it very hard to know when you've completed an exhaustive search. Indeed for the likes of meta and tiktok that's a feature, not a bug, since their goal is to keep you engaged and plugged into "their" content forever.

Not every change is for the better. You gotta admit that TVs used to be able to switch channels much faster then they do now. And analogue controls in cars are safer and better then touch screens for everything.

A lot of change is for the better, but quite a lot is a regression.

The problem is with cataloging and discoverability. After a certain number of photos (or movies, songs, whatever), finding what's relevant is non-trivial.

I think of your suggested idea of objective reviews and classifications quite often, but the problem ends up being discoverability. There have been a handful of sites that were highly useful by aggregating price and consumer sentiment/recommendations from Reddit. They get initial visibility and search traffic, then get penalized by Google. Froogle/Google shopping gets priority and is the only aggregator that Google really wants to include.

Look at defunct sites like Nextag that were moderately useful in the space-- they had free and paid placements. They were steadily growing search visibility until Google started pushing their own product (Froogle, free product listings in 2014ish) and Nextag suddenly "violated Google's policies" and lost 90%+ of their traffic rather quickly (probably 1MM daily visits to under 10k basically overnight). Google shopping technically offers "free product listing placement", hidden well below the ads-- likely as a defense to anti-trust on monopolization of that specific space.

Brickseek and CamelCamelCamel are the two most successful/long lived tools in the space-- and they grew their visibility from the now defunct but once huge deal site FatWallet and SlickDeals. Walled garden subreddits frequently disallow posting of specific tools, so it makes organic growth super challenging-- given that pretty much all commercial queries start with Google or Amazon.

Consumers want lots of things but they don't want to pay. They pay indirectly via advertising.

And Stardock's Start11 adds EveryThing's search to your start menu.