If people's MS subscription revenue were funneled into on-site devs and devops for open source solutions, we'd all live in a better world. Sure, the money wouldn't be funneled to a single ledger in Redmond, but the overall productivity would be higher and there'd be greater GDP growth in other areas.
I've heard of so many small companies with a slightly technical bent replacing their SalesForce with better CRMs that make everyone happier, thanks to AI. MS is next.
Let's make sure that dollars get funneled away from economic rent and into more productive efforts. Schumpeterian rents might exist for a bit, but they should never exist long. Microsoft's rents have lasted for too long to be economically optimal.
Excel is the modern equivalent of the back of a napkin. It is inescapable.
And then they import to excel.
I like CSV as a format!
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?
But firstly, it's a legitimate choice for normies who just want to run a business, and second, as I said, the criticisms this article brings would be applicable to any other big tech provider who is laying off staff and leaning heavily into LLMs.
If it's necessary to recreate all the keyboard shortcuts for Excel like Emacs has done with evil-mode for vim, maybe that works, I don't know.
Hell the finance guys can almost make their own replacement on their own today, with AI.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-pa...
Handling simultaneous edits, guaranteeing correctness, handling massive data sets… as amazing as AI is, this is a huge can of worms.
Any nontrivial excel sheet should be a database backed application, the finance guys who build them are in every sense programmers they're just using the wrong tool by convention.
I agree with you, BTW, but I've never seen moving Excel sheets to an application work in practice. You can do it, and it just creates more Excel sheets.
* Redo UI patterns (for old users): Only matter for on-boarding and compatibility, and probably need to redo the anti-patterns, not necessarily a good idea, or at least must be hold before the next:
* Define a much better internal model than excel has (I bet a mixture of relational, array model as core, then a reactive layer on top), including proper support for correct datatypes (not localized!), dates in all shapes, currency, commodities, unit of measure, etc, tables default as fixed type per column instead of free-form, then we have proper "variant" values, use algebraic types, and so on...
* Then redo the UI
* Define how import/export correctly (so not more non-sense about import based on localized dates, currencies...)
* ... and from legacy formats like Excel
P.D: I explore the idea on https://tablam.org and my goal is eventually marry what excel+access do in one app
So long as you don't have things which aren't dates but which Excel insists totally are. (Meme: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/2429759-involuntary-celibacy...)
But yes, cans of worms are many, and Tardis-like they are larger inside than out.
Let the dinosaurs go extinct!
Edit: actually I think there's got to be a far better and completely different UI that's possible now with AI. There has to be something better. What is it? I don't know. Some clever specialist will invent it.
Just throw the raw data at the LLM and tell it to do the analysis directly on that, and there's a good chance it will use python and some data science libraries for you.
And if you want, it'll turn it into a web page where people can drag and drop more raw data files on to get updated analytics.
The real grip comes from entire business processes implemented across dozens of worksheets with incredibly complicated cross linked formulae relying on Excel edge case behavior. As soon as LibreOffice et al display the most minute differences they're done and will never be mentioned again.
If you're just doing lists with maybe some simple calcs (which is what most people use spreadsheets for most of the time), pretty much anything works.
The vast majority of people I have seen using Excel don't know how to write a formula. Now they just started copy-pasting whatever ChatGPT was telling them to copy-paste, but well... and anyway all the alternatives do support formulas of course.
Why would they give a shit about the little comfort of the employees who don't want to learn new shortcuts?
Otherwise calc has everything for most people. Macros work different a little.
I've been finding myself using Google Sheets more, which has the potential for the same problems in this article.
The computation side is trivial in comparison. But with AI, emulating the UI becomes far easier.
Big business kind of wants 24/4 support that those will not be providing at all though? Plus the various nonsense certifications. I mean try to convince anyone in corporate to use Libre and they'll probably just laugh.
(not that they would ever use that support, they just want to have someone to scapegoat lol)
Row Zero's fully Excel compatible, including keyboard shortcuts, long-tail pivot table configurability, 500+ built-in formulas like LAMBDA and LET, and real-time collab. But it scales 1000x beyond Excel (2 billion row limit vs 1 million for Excel), has built in connectors to everything (Databricks, Postgres, S3, Snowflake, etc), native Python support, deep AI integration with Databricks Genie, and all the security and data governance features to make big banks and healthcare providers comfortable. It's built by the team who brought Rust into AWS and rewrote S3's file system circa 2018.
We're used by individuals and small businesses all the way up to huge deployments in the Fortune 100.
Source: Was founder and CEO, now leading spreadsheet development at Databricks
But is it 1-2-3 compatible?
Excel was for a time when programming meant more arcane languages. In 2026, there is no excuse for a business major not to know Python or R. They're both easy.
Also Excel is probably the best thing MS produces. There is lower hanging fruit elsewhere
Unfortunately I have to.
I can tell you all of the Excel alternatives are extremely disappointing.
And the 3k commits in a month, all good signs
/s
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.
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.
We should stop referring to management at companies as "leaders". They don't lead anything. They perform administrative tasks so that their employees can actually do the real work.
Probably not gonna work: those "technical" officers are mouse-click engineers. IOW, they don't know much detail, but they sure as hell know where to click!
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".
Yeah I've watched Joel Spolsky's "you suck at excel" tutorial, but I've also created financial models for CFOs and the finance team using Excel instead of doing an RShint App because I wanted them to be able to understand and extend the model.
It's software. It can be recreated, more easily than ever.
I'm saying people should put their MS license fees towards in house devs working on open source projects to achieve the goal, rather than just let MS Hoover it up to waste on Copilot interfaces that nobody ever uses. Let the local devs squander that money, after they have reimplemented all the Excel keyboard shortcuts in OpenOffice and added abhorrent plotting themes that recapitulate 30 years of incompetent Microsoft practices.
Idealistic? Sure. But why not try.
- what do "financial models for CEOs" contain apart from long rows and some numeric columns on which elementary arithmetic was applied on?
One of Excel's many powers is letting people play with numbers in cells and see the results of long chains of computations. Or create an array of potential values and see the results across a wide variety of inputs. Or even use the builtin solver to find the value that minimizes or maximizes a desired output...
And thats before starting on the pivot tables!!!
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.
Great term!! :)
What MS365 does best (for now) is being a one stop shop for user/permissions/device management and coming with outlook/exchange/Teams - nobody with purchasing power gives a shit if ppl get Excel or LibreCalc as spreadsheet, they get it because it comes with the rest.
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.
I can build almost any piece of software I can dream up, the data never leaves my machine, and there's literally no way for anyone to charge me any price ever.
But the tools we have to do this suck. We don't have much beyond "here's the source code as text, look at it, and think really hard".
Another comment[0] suggested having AI generate "code walks" through the code. This seems better than our current approach of "my PR contains a diff, good luck".
I'm working on a tool in Emacs that allows me to mark certain lines, or entire projects, as needing review, and then helps me track which parts have been reviewed. I need something to help me find parts of the code I have never reviewed before.
When lines change, they are put up for review. When lines haven't been reviewed for awhile, they are put up for review. Lines are ranked based upon the complexity of the context they are in, and complex areas of the code are reviewed more often.
Basically, stop focusing on individual PRs and instead focus on continuous review of the entire system with tooling that helps identify those parts of the code that are most in need of review.
Reviewing PRs is wasteful because the optimal way to review a system does not match the way a system naturally grows through individual commits.
Our job, much like a locomotive operator, is to make sure the agents don't go off the rails. We call ourselves software engineers in recognition of that.
Aren't they? I know that they, and other big techs, have clauses in their terms that say if they don't meet service requirements they will offer refunds/credits. I've never been in a position where I was the one requesting the refund but I always presumed they actually did it.
Unfortunately the most effective way to learn about what is important is to have it taken away. So I don't believe this is going to change ... ever.
What else won't surprise me is the government trying to step in and making it their problem. That's what I'm worried about. The only right thing to do is remove regulations, remove government intervention from every aspect of the economy, and let the market fix the mess which the central planners have created.
Designing the entire software industry as a giant government-supported oligopoly was not a good idea. It was unethical and it was not going to work in the long term.
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." - Gerald Weinberg, 1970's
> let the market fix the mess which the central planners have created
Isn't a Microsoft dependency failure market-driven? Compared to the 1960's and 1970's, the present-day software industry is much more driven by the market than it is by the government.
Not only that, but perhaps if anti-trust laws were actually enforced, we might actually have competitive alternatives.
I feel like we probably only need a tiny fraction of the compute capacity if we let things be decentralized and let the market operate naturally.
This was my thought years ago and so now it looks blatantly obvious to me with AI data centres driving electricity prices. It's pretty clear the industry is being propped up by other parts of the economy.
The fact that the world relies on four 9's of availability and throws a hissy fit whenever there are outages is an antipattern.
And also, people should get a snow day every once in a while.
Like if Exchange Online went down for an hour every Sunday for maintenance, and they made their network configuration change then, there would have been no cascading failure.
I have never understood why companies chose to standardize on Microsoft everything then switch the businesses to Microsoft Cloud everything in the belief that it was cheaper and better, simply because they don't want to pay money for onsite administrators or local IT guys for their IT. I mean if you want to use Microsoft Office then by regular licenses and run them on premises, but everything in the cloud who thought of that?
Many employees also don't know that their bosses or bosses bosses were also given kickbacks to switch their IT to Microsoft/Google/Oracle centralized services. For some obscure reason company bosses and government institutions still switch to Oracle for their services which don't work, wind up with Oracle negotiating with them for money for services which don't work, then they pay termination fees to Oracle if they bail out early.
Another factor I believe to be at work here is large investment firms like Blackrock, State Street etc pressuring the executives of companies which they are major shareholders in to switch their IT to the IT companies they are major shareholders in, therefore boosting the values of their stocks. For me it is the main reason for this centralization of IT services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
As someone who started using AWS from the time it went beta, I could see the value in it, but I couldn't see why companies had to switch their systems wholesale to it. I could see the benefits for new startups which had to move quickly and early and perhaps have a need for unexpected traffic, but even after some time the stuff would have to move back onsite once things settled down.
Other the end of the day the situation is entirely down to greed and corruption masking as incompetence.
A week or 2 ago in the UK virtually all the major banks went down due to some problems at Google, Microsoft or one of the other companies. So many banks had their IT hosted with them so everything went down simultaneously.
It is time the governments passed legislation forcing these banks not to centralize their IT with these companies and ensure they have their own independent redundant systems. Maybe they should go back to IBM mainframes or something.
Exceedingly simple: those who decide don't know better.
PRs without problems don't really grant any credit against those with problems. I see it it a fraction of PRs. Seeing it sometimes is enough to establish evidence.
"The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something."
From the submitted blog post.
Right?
As opposed to a pile of unmaintainable shit
I don't see what's different today. Some will never learn, but of those who do they'll try things, fail, and then build systems to prevent making those same mistakes again.
AI thrives within those systems.
Now they have an outage that should honestly result in people going to prison, at some point we have to question leadership's ability to... well lead because unless something drastically changes I don't think society wants to deal with a massive transnational trillion+ corporation with various monopolies that controls many aspects of our lives if they're going to continue to give us shit service.
I wish it’d be only global north boomers but India and much of South East Asia also runs on freaking M$ and not unlikely that excel is big in China too.
While we can engineer a system with better availability, seems the market is quite ok with one or two nines for this.
So the trick would be not to make anything truly critical depend on such a service. And no, payroll is not enough, I'm talking OT.
There's only warm fuzzies for helping fix or find OSS but the drive for resilient systems hasn't died.
Other bits of the stack are fine. It's not a flat world.
I know Germany wanted to migrate to Linux but decided to stick to Windows after all.
Same in Sweden, they tried moving away, but then gave up.
Both were headlines a while ago.
Basically migrating away from Microsoft has always a significant cost even for partial replacements. The democratic systems and shareholder pressure makes it hard to keep long-term projects going in the Western countries and companies. Choosing Microsoft has never costed an election nor caused significant share price but going against it has economic and legal risks.
So without a dictating government with nuclear reasons, you will not get enough pressure to move away.
The NSA lost control of EternalBlue which resulted in billions of dollars of economic damage globally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue
They didn't offer any compensation either.
Imagine the Huggingface incident, but with an agent swarm that's deliberately malicious instead of just misaligned.
Most of the analysis and summary that demands LLMs is public data... massive amounts of data. Otherwise, it wouldn't be "warfare". It would just be spying.
This is why agents discovering vulns en masse is pretty great in the long run, it gets ahead of these sort of malicious hoarding shitheads with more resources than ethics.
That's the same situation as before AI: many developers don't have time/resources/expertise to prevent the advanced exploits, and few very advanced players do.
Edit: and you've spent time in Shanghai too! Small world!
“Microsoft is too big to go down, why do we need a redundancy?” Another round, barkeep.
“Amazon won’t ever have downtime, they’re huge! Our workloads are much safer there.” Make that two, what with MEC1-AZ2 being a smoking hole.
“Why would we need backups when these providers offer us a five-nines SLA?” Sorry, make that three, since Google’s EU-WEST-2-B AZ lost power and its redundancies failed to start.
Now don’t get me wrong, nothing is perfect or bulletproof. That being said, the more eggs you put into a single basket, the more of them get damaged if something happens to said basket.
Everyone lost the plot on backups, redundancy, and diversification in favor of single, “do it all” providers and hyperscalers.
What could possibly go wrong?
It's clear from the wording of the updates that Microsoft took the better part of a day to even figure out what was happening, and that they're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, instead of following the kind of precise recovery plan that they would have had, had they understood their own systems.
What do you expect amz to do about the drone strikes haha.
if you absolutely needed your servers in an active war zone for some reason cant imagine you'd have five 9s either
That being said, I do distinctly remember being called an alarmist for warning that if a plurality of compute is in one physical area, and said compute serves a large amount of customers, then that space is a gigantic soft target.
“Nobody is going to attack a datacenter, stego-tech, you’re being completely unreasonable.”
Mmm, delicious schadenfreude.