Without going into too much detail, I did found a MJ based startup, however I ran into 3 big problems:
1. My startup focused on fostering relationships with producers and distributors, both of whom are hesitant to openly discuss or display their business, location etc in a way that can be easily accessed publicly.
2. Legal fees. I tried to set up everything as legitimately as possible through a lawyer as well as keep him on retainer in case I ended up in any trouble with the law. Massive overhead.
3. Saturation and fear. At the time of my efforts there were two major shifts in the West Coast market. The first was a flood of growers both indoor and out that greatly reduced the value of anything that was not of the absolute highest quality. The second was the crackdown on many major players in the game; people saw that old names in the MJ industry were getting raided and prosecuted and started to either withdraw or severely limit their business relationships.
Basically until everything is legalized at both the state and federal levels it will continue to be very difficult and expensive to try to revolutionize this industry.
TL:DR
The media is a bunch of haters, our wedding wasn't as ecologically devastating as it was played out to be. Why'd you people use so many expletives about us?
The wedding wasn't where the stories said it was (private land not a public park), there were no endangered species that were put at risk, and only one reporter out of 100 stories that ran bothered to call them for comment, so it's a bit more than that.
But, as one comment said, if that story were printed on paper it would have needed a redwood to make the sheets. Probably longer than it needed to be.
That's a typical smear tactic. Raise a hypothetical as a certainty that is impossible to disprove, but makes the person look terrible.
The proof lies with the people making the extraordinary claims. Reporters could have easily waited to get all of the facts and if that means waiting to their are back from their honeymoon, so be it. Why give a pass to incompetent reporters?
I agree with you, I actually had a client who demanded that the data in their project be done in excel (with multiple files ranging from 1-3 gb in size!). Both myself and my partner tried exhaustively to use a database or even JSON/XML solutions but the client kept repeating "in the real world business is done in excel!" Needless to say it was a nightmare.
I don't have the full picture here but by moving away from an Excel format you are also potentially taking away a lot of control they have themselves over managing the data and working the data which Excel is extremely good at with little to no programming.
Your point is true generally, but I have yet to use a version of Excel that can handle multiple gigabytes of data without serious performance degradation and probably a lot of crashes.
Which would matter, if businesses cared. I spend 4 days every month compiling a 1.5GB, Excel-based report. 80% of that time is spent with Excel frozen up and me playing on my phone, hoping that when Excel unfreezes it doesn't crash.
I suggested porting the process to Access with an Excel-based front end, which would cut the compilation time down to 4 hours at the most. I was denied due to the fact that whomever supports it after me will more than likely not have Access experience, and told to continue with the 4 days of hours-long freeze ups.
This is seen all the time in Accounting departments. GAAP and STAT financials in spreadsheets with millions of linked documents and macros. A large amount of this deals with business logic being tied directly in Excel. Their data and the constraints around it are embedded into the spreadsheet. Segregating the data from the spreadsheet means adapting the business logic from Excel and maintaining it in two places. (Source: I work with an accounting department that regularly deals with spreadsheets that take anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours to load/process/filter).
Excel is absolutely standard in accounting circles. It has the benefit of allowing accountants to do all sorts of things without knowing how to program.
Maybe your client was wanting ubiquitous Excel-compatible export/import - not for the back end to actually be Excel? Making any table in your app exportable to at least CSV is pretty straightforward.
I think that is perfectly logical, the project was basically a series of command line tools. I tried to swap out excel for CSV or at least TSV, the client demanded .xls in .xls out. Believe me we tried every suggestion and that was as far as the client would negotiate. We got it to work and I died a little inside.
That person is obviously bat-shit crazy. I am very surprised to hear that Excel or any other spreadsheet program will open multi-gigabyte files without exploding.
When moving from a mostly broken .xls data export system to a CSV file with the same data, we got lots of complaints from customers that it was too hard to use.
CSV files ARE broken in Excel. Have you ever tried importing a column of data with numbers that contain leading zeros / are not meant as numbers? There are at least 5 ways to do it wrong.
I know how to do this in LibreOffice (requires an extra step above and beyond double clicking) but honestly I do not know how to do it in Excel, and I would not attempt to learn or teach this knowledge to a person who does not have experience with a different spreadsheet tool first.
