By Hiran de Silva
Imagine you’re sitting in your car.
You’re late.
Traffic is at a standstill.
The motorway is gridlocked, the sat-nav estimates keep getting worse, and somewhere ahead an ambulance is trying to force its way through lanes of stationary vehicles.
Every motorist recognises the problem.
Traffic congestion is one of those frustrations we’ve all simply learned to accept.
Naturally, wherever there is a problem, someone appears with a solution.
Enter the helicopter salesman.
He explains that helicopters fly over traffic jams.
No queues.
No congestion.
No delays.
His demonstrations are impressive. His brochures are convincing. His customers happily conclude that helicopters solve a problem that ordinary cars never could.
So far, everything makes perfect sense.
Now suppose I tell you something the helicopter salesman never mentions.
Every car built during the last thirty years already has a switch.
It’s an unremarkable little switch. Most motorists have never noticed it.
But when you flick that switch…
…your car flies.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
It lifts off, flies itself using the sat-nav coordinates you’ve already entered, avoids every traffic jam completely, and lands at your destination.
No driving.
No transfers.
No changing vehicles.
No waiting.
Simply point your existing car at the destination and let it take you there.
Now ask yourself one simple question.
Does that discovery change anything?
Of course it does.
Suddenly the conversation is no longer about helicopters.
It’s about information.
Because if your own car can already do exactly what the helicopter salesman is promising…
…why wasn’t that mentioned?
The salesman will have answers.
He’ll probably deny such a switch exists.
Or claim it would be dangerous.
Or insist that cars were never designed to fly.
He may even argue that hardly anybody knows about this mysterious switch anyway, so there is still a perfectly good market for helicopters.
Commercially, he’s right.
If people don’t know what they already possess, they become customers for something else.
Then the conversation becomes even more interesting.
The helicopter can’t collect you from your driveway.
It can’t pick you up from the middle of a traffic jam.
You’ll need to find your own way to the nearest landing site.
The salesman hands you a map.
You’ll need buses.
Perhaps taxis.
Maybe trains.
Only then can the helicopter begin solving the problem it was sold to solve.
Meanwhile, your own car—if only you knew about the switch—would have taken you directly from your driveway to your destination without any of those intermediate steps.
At this point the philosopher asks the question that really matters.
Not…
“Can helicopters solve traffic problems?”
Clearly they can.
The real question is this:
If everyone knew about the switch…
…would there still be much of a market for helicopters?
The answer isn’t really about helicopters.
It’s about marketing.
Salespeople have no obligation to promote competing solutions.
Marketing exists to present its own product in the most favourable light.
If the target market is unaware of a better alternative, that ignorance becomes part of the commercial landscape.
Nothing illegal.
Nothing unusual.
Just business.
But there is a profound philosophical difference between selling a solution…
…and selling a solution while omitting the existence of another one the customer already owns.
That distinction changes everything.
Because now we’re no longer discussing products.
We’re discussing knowledge.
We’re discussing how markets are shaped.
We’re discussing the difference between objective reality and commercially convenient narratives.
And that brings me to spreadsheets.
For years we’ve been told that organisations struggle with consolidation because “Excel can’t do it.”
So we’re encouraged to buy helicopters.
Planning platforms.
Replacement tools.
Cloud solutions.
Migration programmes.
The familiar sales pitch.
But what if Excel already contains the equivalent of that hidden switch?
What if the capability has been there for decades?
What if spreadsheets could already work collaboratively, without the endless importing, exporting, emailing and manual consolidation that so many vendors describe as “the Excel problem”?
If that’s true…
…then the question changes completely.
It is no longer:
“Why would anyone still use Excel?”
It becomes:
“Why wasn’t anyone told about the switch?”
Mic drop.
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