I wrote a story about a company I’m advising for last week called Codenvy, who is delivering modular, scalable, cloud development environments using their web IDE and Docker. I'm currently working my way through the spreadsheet to API, and API to spreadsheet solutions I track on, and it is making me think that someone should deliver a Codenvy-like containerized spreadsheet environment.
With this type of environment you could forever end the emailing of spreadsheets, allowing people to craft spreadsheets, complete with all the data and visualization goodness they desire, and clone, fork, share, and collaborate around these containerized spreadsheets. You could have a library of master planned spreadsheets that your company depends on, and manage user permissions, analytics, and even scalability, performance, and distribution of vital spreadsheets.
Using this platform you could easily spawn spreadsheet driven APis using services like API Spark, and you could come full circle and have spreadsheets that obtain their data directly from valuable API driven resources, to really blow your mind. Personally I'm not a big spreadsheet lover, but I do recognize that it is where a majority of the worlds data resides, and the user interface of choice for many business folk--making it a good candidate for the next generation of containerized API data sources, and clients.
Just another one of my random ideas that accumulate in my Evernote, that I'll never have time to build myself, and hoping you will tackle for me. As I review all of the existing spreadsheet APi solutions available currently, I’m sure I'll have more API centric, spreadsheet ideas bubble over t o share with you.
