Business spreadsheets most definitely need help, though perhaps mobile Google Drive, which is currently atrocious, is too intimidating to take on.
However, I have to applaud anything that moves our information-consumption into a more delimited, structured form. I love narrative and paragraphs, but Tufte's small multiples is something that would greatly help day-to-day communication
In what way? Are you talking about design (look and feel) or capabilities. I can't think of too many things that could be lacking from Excel in terms of capabilities for business and engineering applications.
Sorry, I meant in the context of the headline "...for the tablet age"...My experience so far has been with Google Spreadsheets through the iPad browser and it is barely functional. Microsoft's offering may be better, but still short of what traditional Excel users are used to.
In any case, Excel/Google Docs have such a strong, relied-upon foundation that even if someone built a great spreadsheet from scratch that was unparalleled for the tablet audience, the risk of being dominated by a sudden entrance of either Microsoft/Google is probably too much to commit the funding that's needed to build the infrastructure to support such a platform.
I think Grid is doing the right thing, but staying away from the business-type spreadsheet...as there are plenty of ways that spreadsheets are useful, even without numbers. I use spreadsheets all the time to plan out projects and take notes, as I know I want to end up adding categories/subcategories/deadline columns that I want to aggregate/sort upon.
However, I have to applaud anything that moves our information-consumption into a more delimited, structured form. I love narrative and paragraphs, but Tufte's small multiples is something that would greatly help day-to-day communication
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_multiple