The biggest reason why lists matter so much is because. Most data structure use cases in everyday life are lists, or lists of lists(Tables). Of course you have graphs and trees. But for all practical purposes, most problems there are, are either lists or tables. Excel will benefit, if they add optional tree and graph interfaces. Like you get an option to build a graph of how your business things are connected and help you figure the shortest steps to a solution etc.
And yes if you want to build a Microsoft Excel killer. Please build a thick client desktop application which is as feature rich as a Excel and give it away for free. Charge for the cloud usage. Anything less isn't going to cut it.
Excel is just way ahead of anything that is out there. The only competing product I've seen is Libreoffice Calc. But even that has a long way to go.
Also, you live in a 3D world, hence any non-cognitively overloading "work surface" has to be -1 dim, so 2D, hence List or ListOfLists (spreadsheet). Anything else will require brainpower you could be using for something else instead! (like solving the actual problem, not masturbating with the tools...)
Other alternatives are Trees, which are also "lists of lists" but without the size constraints (Graphs "look 2D" but easily grow multi-dimensional information-wise). But trees have a big problem: they easily grow bigger than the screen, so you expand/collapse them, so you always end up with hidden information that you can overlook - hence they are really bad for sloppy people (I know it from first hand experience... if I'm not careful I can really forget that whole sections or Wrkflowy trees or Org-mode documents I work with even exits!)
Now combining list & lists-of-lists & trees & formatted text could work, if they manage to not informationally overload the user.
But I'm 99% sure that any tool more complex than matrixes and trees as information shape will not take on wide scale, until we manage to couple it with some superhuman-Clippy AI-assistant that almost reads your mind. We're stupid monkeys and it's only so much our brains can handle...
The biggest reason why lists matter so much is because. Most data structure use cases in everyday life are lists, or lists of lists(Tables). Of course you have graphs and trees. But for all practical purposes, most problems there are, are either lists or tables. Excel will benefit, if they add optional tree and graph interfaces. Like you get an option to build a graph of how your business things are connected and help you figure the shortest steps to a solution etc.
And yes if you want to build a Microsoft Excel killer. Please build a thick client desktop application which is as feature rich as a Excel and give it away for free. Charge for the cloud usage. Anything less isn't going to cut it.
Excel is just way ahead of anything that is out there. The only competing product I've seen is Libreoffice Calc. But even that has a long way to go.