Philippa Kaur

For many, Microsoft Excel is the epitome of corporate drudgery. Its dreaded #VALUE! error has driven an incalculable number of users to despair. Yet among financial analysts, management consultants and even the odd business journalist, the spreadsheet program, which this month entered its 40th year, is a handy tool for everything from interrogating company financials to pricing assets. Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, the software giant that created the program, has called it the “best consumer product” the company ever made. It even has its own world championship in Las Vegas, where spreadsheet wizards pivot, concatenate and VLOOKUP their way to victory. More

Elon Musk’s choice of Warner Bros Studios for the long-anticipated launch of his robotaxi on October 10th is entirely appropriate. Hollywood’s film studios are as much a dream factory as Tesla, his electric-car company. The vision he served up, accompanied by whoops of delight from the superfans in the audience, is an autonomous Cybercab so cheap that it will serve as “individualised mass transit”. But Mr Musk’s promises were, like many Hollywood movies, long on bombast and short on reality. The road to self-driving taxis will be long, and Tesla will have tough competition along the way. More

ONE OF BRITAIN’S richest men, Sir Jim Ratcliffe was long considered a magnate who kept a low profile. Not any more. He and INEOS, a chemicals firm he founded in 1998, have stepped into the limelight—by expanding into the sports business, first by buying FC Lausanne-Sport, a Swiss football club, in 2017. Now, INEOS sponsors the All Blacks, the world’s most famous rugby side; its boss holds a stake in Mercedes, a leading Formula One outfit; the company owns INEOS Grenadiers, an elite cycling team. And INEOS Britannia, the group’s sailing venture, is the first British team since 1964 to reach the final of the America’s Cup, the world’s oldest sailing competition. Its 13 races against the holders, from New Zealand, start on Saturday. More

Not long ago, as consumers emerged from pandemic lockdowns, it seemed the moment for luxury e-commerce had arrived. Cashed-up shoppers, now accustomed to buying almost anything online, were hunting for new outfits to parade in. Online purchases of luxury goods hit €73bn ($80bn) globally in 2022, up from €33bn in 2019, outpacing the already rapid growth of in-store luxury sales, according to Bain, a consultancy (see chart). More

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MASAYOSHI SON is a man of contrasting superlatives. At the height of the dotcom bubble in early 2000 the Japanese technology mogul was briefly the world’s richest person, before losing $77bn in paper wealth, more than anyone before. In 2021 SoftBank Group, his telecoms-and-software conglomerate turned investment powerhouse, reported the biggest annual net profit in the history of Japan Inc, followed a year later by the second-biggest loss. His $20m wager in 2000 on Alibaba, a tatty online marketplace that grew into China’s mightiest e-emporium, counts as one of the best in the annals of venture capital (VC); his later $16bn punt on WeWork, an office-rental startup with tech pretensions, is an all-time dud. He has been called a “genius” and “dumb money”. More

A smartphone is a testimony to the power of standardisation. Comprising components from hundreds of suppliers, it can find a signal almost anywhere in the world and connect to a wide array of ancillary devices all because countless companies have subjected themselves to a common set of technical specifications. More

Two things are often said of Ratan Tata, former head of the Tata Group, one of India’s mightiest conglomerates: he was a giant of Indian business, and among its most virtuous figures. For a society as fractious as India, the esteem in which he was held was remarkably wide. More