I think I agree with you anyway, but if Amazon was MS and FireOS was the only platform with Office, especially Outlook, it would tilt the balance a bit.
Microsoft’s Office leverage is gone. If they try to use it as a hammer in defense of their platform, their market share will drop. Their only option now is to try to increase the platform buy-in again.
Given your experience, do you see GAS overtaking VBA, and if so, in which fields? (Finance?) What industries were the companies you helped switch over working in?
I ask because I'm while I'm roughly intermediate with VBA, I'm not sure if I should continue pursuing VBA or invest in something that might be more valuable in the future.
Isn't it just JavaScript + a library?
It also has the same problem that VBA has in that the code resides local to the object consuming it (spreadsheet, doc, etc), so you can’t version control it like you would for a normal application).
VBA even has the advantage of being able to load .NET libraries, which is huge given that you can let the .NET VM do the heavy lifting and use VBA to lay results out onto your sheet or Word doc.
In the early days Sheets wasn’t as good; but I would say it is better than Excel if you’re willing to spend a few million to port your complex macros.
Slides still blows though.
Edit: Industry largely is irrelevant; most big companies have custom software running their main production line (be that software, telecom or manufacturing). MS Office / Google Apps have a sweet spot in back-office functions. Google Apps allows a lot more automation (and most of the kids coming out of school know basic programming these days). No; it’s not as good as custom version-controlled software, but it’s a hell of a lot better than e-mailing .xlsx files back and forth. You can more or less treat a Google sheet as a lambda function, which is pretty neat.
Word and Excel are gargantuan pieces of software. VBA aside (which is used very very heavily, and Google’s Scripting Framework doesn’t compare given that everything is executed on their servers), there are some really niche features deep inside of Word that people at big companies use daily.
Also, Sheets is slow as hell compared to Excel, even on small time spreadsheets. Not going to work on the trading floor.
Then there is the whole “kind of sort of works offline” bit that really diminishes the value of using Google Docs. Docs basically doesn’t work on low bandwidth connections, which is a daily reality for a lot of business people that travel. That’s the main reason why I prefer Office; it is a lot easier to work on talks and blog posts offline with it.