The term “business model” first came into widespread use with the invention of personal computer and the spreadsheet (空白表格程序). Before the spreadsheet, business planning usually meant producing a single forecast. At best, you did a little sensitivity analysis around the projection. The spreadsheet ushered in a much more analytic approach to planning because every major line item could be pulled apart, its components and subcomponents analyzed and tested. You could ask what- if questions about the critical assumptions on which your business depended---for example, what if customers are more price-sensitive than we thought?---and with a few keystrokes, you could see how any change would play out on every aspect of the whole. In other words, you could model the behavior of a business. Before the computer changed the nature of business planning, most successful business models were created more by accident than by elaborate design. By enabling companies to tie their marketplace insights much more tightly to the resulting economics, spread sheet made it possible to model business before they were launched.
