>Suddenly, the field has begun to bloom. A small cluster of startups have in the past year released spreadsheet products

All of which are subscription based SAAS. Maybe I am showing my VisiCalc oldster roots, but I want my document related tools to be pay once / run locally.

I long for a computing world where the free tier is run-in-a-browser-on-someone-else's-computer and the paid tier is run local and native.

I'm glad there are more tools to make working with data easier, but I don't use any of them because putting my data into a proprietary service I have to keep paying for is a dealbreaker.