Last Friday, Paris Buttfield-Addison posted 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple, which kind of blew up. > A major brick-and-mortar store sold an Apple Gift Card that Apple seemingly took offence to, and locked out my entire Apple ID, effectively bricking my devices and my iCloud Account, Apple Developer ID, and everything associated with it, and I have no recourse. Yeah, effectively, they got a $500 Apple gift card, tried to add it to their account, and this triggered a high enough severity fraud alert in Apple's system that it automatically locked their Apple account. Not good. The post is a good reminder of how tied to these large companies we really are. I assume most people reading this post have an Apple account, and it's a good exercise to consider how much of your digital life would become inaccessible if you suddenly lost access to that account. Would you lose all your photos? All of your contacts? All of your files? Obviously, the odds of you losing access to your Apple account are exceptionally low, and Buttfield-Addison's experience is the exception, but I think it is a good reminder that completely benign behavior can occasionally lead to serious consequences you would not see coming. This leads me to three main thoughts on the topic. First, companies like Apple and Google have over 1 billion users, and their automated systems are likely correct far more often than they are wrong, and I don't think they need to go away. However, a good appeals process is necessary to have, and what happened in this person's case is not ideal. How would someone without a blog and ability to reach an audience have gotten this solved? Second, when you're locked out of your Apple ID, you should be able to download effectively everything from your account. This would mean that if I was locked out of my Apple ID, maybe I wouldn't be able to use it or add new data to that account. But if I still was able to authenticate, I should be able to download my photos, my files, and other relevant information that I may want to get out. This would make it so that even if I wasn't able to get the attention that this person did and resolve the issue, at least I could still get a backup of my information. And third, I strongly think that everyone should have some level of redundancy in as much of their digital life as they can. Photos are the big one that I think everyone should be considering. A lot of the things on my computer can be replaced or recreated if they're lost, but not my photos; I can never recreate those moments that I've captured. I personally treat Apple Photos as my de facto photo library, and it works great, but for many years, I had Google Photos also backing up those images, which gave me a second online backup. In the event that my Apple ID was locked, I would still have all of my photos in Google. Since getting a Synology NAS last year, I've actually switched that to having the Synology Photos app automatically back up my photo library to the NAS so that I have local access to all of my photos. Now those photos aren't tied to any online account, they're literally on a hard drive in my house. Consider what's important to you and figure out a solution that works for you. * * * This story has a happy ending, with Buttfield-Addison posting an update yesterday: > We’re back! A lovely man from Singapore, working for Apple Executive Relations, who has been calling me every so often for a couple of days, has let me know it’s all fixed. It looks like the gift card I tried to redeem, which did not work for me, and did not credit my account, was already redeemed in some way (sounds like classic gift card tampering), and my account was caught by that. Obviously it’s unacceptable that this can happen, and I’m still trying to get more information out of him, but at least things are now mostly working. Great news, but again, would someone without a blog and a few thousand social media followers have been able to get here? I don't know…

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Excel has always been more than a spreadsheet. For decades it has been the place where business logic quietly lives. Not in software systems designed for control, but in the free space where analysts, planners and managers actually think. What interests me today is how this space is changing as AI becomes a co-worker rather than a tool. And why Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella keeps returning to Excel when he talks about the future of knowledge work. It suggests that spreadsheets are not a relic of a pre-AI world. They may become one of the primary surfaces where humans steer autonomous agents. ### What spreadsheets already are A spreadsheet is a modelling environment. It shows reality and scenarios at once, across time and uncertainty. It is where risks, margins, and alternatives can co-exist and be compared. It is also a subtle form of programming without the ceremony: a model emerges step by step, and the “code” is simply what the sheet becomes. Nadella makes this explicit when he calls spreadsheets **Turing complete**. In principle they can express any logic a general computer can. Which means they are not just containers for numbers. They are a programming language that millions know by instinct, without naming it as such. > Excel Agent is not a UI-level wrapper. It’s actually a model that is in the middle tier. … I have a full understanding of all the native artifacts of Excel. Because if you think about it, if I’m going to give it some reasoning task, I need to even fix the reasoning mistakes I make. That means I need to not just see the pixels, I need to be able to see, ‘Oh, I got that formula wrong,’ and I need to understand that. - Satya Nadella. ### Rows, columns and the human mind There is a reason this format never felt like learning a new skill. Tables appear across all recorded history. They give us a humane geometry for complexity. Rows group cases, columns define attributes, and the grid allows order without forcing abstraction too early. You can just see what is happening. That deep familiarity matters. New interfaces rarely displace structures that are shaped by human cognition. ### Excel as the IDE we already use Nadella pushes the idea further. He calls Excel an IDE for people who are not thought of as programmers. In software development the IDE is the cockpit where you run, test, and inspect the behaviour of code. Something similar happens in Excel: forecasting, checking dependencies, tracing errors, comparing scenarios. And that cockpit becomes even more important when thousands of AI agents are working in parallel. He describes a shift from **micro execution** to **macro delegation, micro steering**. We will give missions to agents, then watch for anomalies, approve changes, redirect effort. The work will be choosing what matters, not executing each step. For that you need a surface where the structure is visible and steerable. Something like a spreadsheet. ### The sheet joins the workflow This is not about adding AI features to an old tool. It is about moving business logic into a live environment where AI participates: • agents draft projections and proposals directly in the grid • humans intervene at the right moments • the surface shows risk, uncertainty, and alternatives • acceptance and rejection become learning signals for the model In this reading, Excel is not being replaced. It is completing a long arc. From modelling… to programming… to a place where humans and agents collaborate in real time. ### The question that follows If the spreadsheet becomes a cockpit for autonomous agents, what does that mean for governance, for transparency, for the authority of human judgement? We are not only updating a tool. We are updating the boundary between what people decide and what systems propose. The table might remain familiar, but the activity inside it will feel new. It is worth paying attention. The future of AI in organisations may not arrive as a new interface. It may arrive in the grid we already trust. * * * Excel, the Hidden Operating System of Business ReasoningExcel has long been the silent operating system of business reasoning. AI may be about to extend that logic into natural language.Rob HoeijmakersRob Hoeijmakers

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