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.
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“商业模型”这个术语是随着个人计算机的发明和空白表格程序的问世而得以广泛应用的。在空白表格程序发明之前，商业策划一般意味着做出一个单一性预测。你充其量只能对某个项目做出一些敏感性分析。这种空白表格程序为计划带来了更强的可分析性途径，因为每一个主要列项都能够被拆分，每一个成分和细节都能够被分析和检验。你可以针对你的决定性的商业设想做任何的“假设式”的疑问。举例来说，如果顾客对于价格的敏感性比我们预想的要高，我们该怎样?而只要敲几下键盘，你就能够知道哪一种变化能够在整体上对各个方面造成影响。换句话说，你能够将商业行为模式化。计算机改变了商业计划的本质。在此之前，很多的成功的商业模型都不是出于精心的设计，而是得之于偶然。空白表格程序使公司将它们的市场洞察和经济影响紧密相联。从而在计划出来之前就制定商业模式成为了可能。
