All roads lead to Excel. When you try to make a nice dashboard in Jira that incorporated custom fields and all the data was normalized, nope - they send out an excel spreadsheet every time. They do this to any tool you try to use as a group tool to update things - like Confluence. Before you know it it's back in Excel again and you have multiple sources that keep getting lost.

I think the criticism this post makes applies regardless of how you get your spreadsheets. It would apply equally to Google Workspace.

Plus, I guess there are office 365 outages, but the outage I personally hear more chatter about is the hosted exchange services (outlook), you will still need an email server in a post ai world, right?

What’s your Excel replacement solution?

The idea that small companies would have fewer problems if they had to debug vibecoded software is badly misguided.

> In the age of AI there's ZERO reason for "the global North" to continue using Microsoft.

They own 27% of OpenAI. I don't think that having all of them swap to ChatGPT is necessarily going to have the effect you're hoping.

The problem is never Excel, its user and permissions management. Apart from Google Suite there is not really any other one stop shop for all of that, and definitly nothing open source (for now)...

You write in the imperative, as if advising a leader.

However, leaders are advised by their underlings, who are swayed by their technical officers, who are charmed by the commercial arm of corporations.

The only effective path to actual change is to charm the technical officers with a product that is strictly superior in the metrics they care about. They'll then work their way up the chain.

With respect: you're a biologist, and your experience with backoffice software requirements is probably the same as my experience with biochemistry: near total ignorance.

There are exabytes of documents in Microsoft formats that can be at best "read" with a significant level of data corruption in other products (formatting errors). Writing them back out with shredding them is hit & miss at best. Entire MS products have no equivalent at all that can open their file formats, such as MS Access and Power BI.

Word isn't just paragraphs, italic, and bold.

Excel has features you probably have never even heard of, but people use at scale. Things like tabular data connections using OData. It's the front-end for SQL Server Analysis Services. It has the Mashup columnar engine from Power BI built in to it. Etc, etc, etc.

These things are massive products, with deep integrations across each other, third-party software, third-party plugins, cloud products, and on and on.

There's easily several million man-years of effort sunk into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.

Switching costs are not a matter of failing to "somehow convince" people to switch.

The switching costs are on the order of trillions of dollars, not a decision to be taken lightly.

Here's some critical points everybody normally ignores in these discussion:

1) Partial switching doesn't help, because now you have two problems!

2) Everyone else has to switch too. Google Workspace people were laughing during the Outlook outage, eeeeexcept... they couldn't send or receive emails either -- because their business partners, vendors, and customers likely used Outlook.

3) The alternative with the same features, same level of integration, same commercial support, etc... is the same thing, with the same problems, but just a different brand.

You can't escape the reality of this, it is what it is, there's no nirvana that we could all achieve if we "just" did something "simple".

More likely than Excel getting replaced is that agents and users collaborate through Excel.

> In the age of AI there's ZERO reason for "the global North" to continue using Microsoft. Wean your finance guys off of Excel, somehow.

What does AI have to do with it? Are you proposing that we replace Excel for accounting purposes with something vibecoded? That sounds a bit nuts to me. You can pay a bit of money for mature software that will probably not fail to add 2 + 2 correctly and will not run away with your wife, so why give that up?

I actually suspect that companies such as Microsoft pushing for AI everywhere may undermine that proposition... but then, the alternative is probably LibreOffice Calc, which is eminently boring and doesn't have Copilot popping up.

After 30+ years of hearing this type of twaddle, it's more likely for Microsoft to keel over because of its own leadership incompetence than to be so much as dented by any of these half-baked community efforts.

One can only hope everything you've laid out comes to fruition.

The finance team would give up cocaine before MS Excel. And they would give up water before cocaine. Now you know how important Excel is.

Depends how you do it. You could easily replace MS rent with OpenAnthroogle rent instead.

Office 365 is the cheapest solution. Its five subscriptions (email, office software, storage, chat/calls) bundled into one 11 euro/month deal.

Unless you spin up an entire devops team plus an ML team to run inference at scale in-house, you're just changing where you funnel your subscription money.

Also: No home-grown CRM will have, in the long run, uptimes anywhere approaching e.g. Office365. You're just smearing one large outage into a lot more small ones, plus a few data losses.

That rent buys you something. The internal development buys you something very different. You might want to make a reasoned call on what you're buying instead of making GDP predictions.

The ONLY WAY to get rid of MS Excel is to make something better and then literally force feed it to the finance folks who will go kicking and screaming all the way.