Then there's the ongoing War On Native Apps.
I'm no prophet, but I did predict then that the browser would have eaten all the business applications space by now. It was just obvious. Colleagues objected that the web could not match rich native programs.
Excel is a much better product than Google Sheets, but having the better product doesn't mean having the winning product.
Google Sheets ate the lower end, though; it's a bit like iOS vs Android.
Actually the web now is 100X more beautiful and responsive than at that time. I mean what you can do with an intranet server, not the radioactive media monstrosities.
Not really a spreadsheet person, I can believe Excel is better than Sheets. But is web vs native the reason?
To the user I'd say it's a trade-off that gains you little or nothing and loses a lot over native apps. The benefits of switching to browser and cloud based apps go to the organization you work for the and software companies selling the products.
Much better product? Sheets takes literally seconds to download and install and runs on all your devices. Also it automatically syncs your data between devices and sharing data with other people is as easy as sharing a website. These are very important features in my view and makes Sheets into a better product than Excel. A power user might have different opinions, but to me writing sheet.new in my browser is just so much more convenient.
When I first came on HN and learned about YC's motto (build something users love) this idea was reaffirmed.
[1] Google optimizes for a collaborative quick spreadsheet program (handy for consumers), and as other comments say, Microsoft focuses on pro spreadsheet use (e.g. finance).
Honestly though, I do think Word captured a really nice standard feature set. And docs does a darn fine job of matching that set one to one. The image placement and handling can be a little wonky at times (at least the last time that I used it) but that's what one gets for trying to handle it all in html/javascript/canvas? For what it does, it's a mighty fine product.
- Always-visible word count (added recently, but missing for nearly a decade)
- Custom text styles—you can modify the existing ones, but not create new ones with new names
It's gotten much worse. Now you have iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, wed, and Linux(?). In 2000, you had Windows. You couldn't do anything interesting on mobile, Web 2.0 (cringe) wasn't a thing, and Mac's market share was about 3%.