Spreadsheets serve as weapons of mass cost destruction | Media | The Observer

Bricklin and Frankston never patented VisiCalc, and so it was imitated - first by Lotus with 1-2-3 and later by Microsoft with Excel, which now dominates the market. Nowadays in every office in the developed world spreadsheets are used every day for budgeting, planning, invoicing, cash flow analysis, accounting and just about every other bureaucratic task involving calculations. For most people, VisiCalc's legacy is a powerful tool that takes the drudgery out of office life.

But not for everyone. Cut to Limerick, Ireland's third city where, on the Raheen Industrial Estate in the southern suburbs, the computer giant Dell has a large manufacturing plant employing 3,000 people. On Thursday 8 January, those employees discovered that 1,900 of them would be made redundant over the next twelve months. Dell is switching manufacture from Limerick to Poland, where wages are about two-thirds lower than in Ireland. According to the Irish Times, local business leaders estimate that the knock-on effects on companies that rely on Dell for work could see 'in the region of 7,000 to 10,000' further jobs at risk, threatening to send the local economy 'into meltdown'.

You can see how this decision was made. Large companies such as Dell are always running scenarios through spreadsheets. Somewhere in corporate HQ in Dallas, a senior executive has been doing spreadsheet modelling which shows that the annual cost of employing an Irish worker is now significantly more than the annual cost of hiring a Polish worker. He or she has been looking at the numbers and doing a what-if-we-moved-to-Poland? simulation. And five years down the line, a similar spreadsheet will be used for a what-if-we-moved-to-Accra? simulation - and the stout citizens of Lodz will be wondering how they are going to cope with the meltdown of the economic ecosystem that evolved around their shiny new Dell plant.

Spreadsheets serve as weapons of mass cost destruction | Media | The Observer