Spreadsheet as a database

I am by no means a Microsoft dev expert, I think the last time I used Dev studio every day was back in the 1990s. But it always amuses me that the casual programmer is quite inadvertently catered for by Microsoft without them really realising.

If you think of the Excel VBA macro language, there are some people whose IDE is Excel. VBA is the integrated language and the spreadsheet, well that is the database.

So tightly integrated ecosystem that was completely unintended. I was thinking of this recently as I was updating one of my simple spreadsheets on Google docs.

Of course there is nothing wrong with this, but in my mind this "casual" programmer has no other tools to use - and has not really looked at escaping from Microsoft's ecosystem. Actually in their case I think their learning curve elsewhere would just be too high to be worthwhile, unless they were really motivated by something like ethics or anti vendor lock in - such things rarely trouble these people.

I wonder if Google docs is targeting such casual programmers who just want to get something productive done with minimum fuss.