and yet all these businesses run excel in production. I'd rather implement R code (with localizreed variables and dumb algorithms, so there's something funny in it) than an excel-spreadsheet. But somehow there's a difference...
The places where Excel are used are fairly appropriate. Way downstream, for simple tasks.
Visual programming platforms like Knime is the next step for these teams, and then onto something like RStudio as they complete the transition towards employing data science in their pipelines.