Just like with Teams and Slack, the office product just has to be good enough, and it will succeed. Microsoft doesn’t need to make money off it, just protect their office subscriptions. Slack and AirTable need to make money.
This might make AirTable loose a pretty large customer even if the actual end users in the company prefers AirTable.
If a team in a mid-to-large company wants to use Airtable, they will have to spend a lot of time championing the process--audits, vetting, bidding, legal, data management, and on and on and on.
If they subscribe to Office365, they've already gone through this process. It will either be enabled by default, or be subject to a much less stringent review before IT flips the switch.
Put another way: money (at least the sums involved for most SaaS) is the least important objection a customer might have to adoption.
Side note: this is also part of the reason why Excel is so popular, even though many executives are aware of its short-commings and might wish for something more integrated. Even if they have the budget, it is excruciating trying to onboard a SaaS offering.
I didn’t mean replacements for Excel itself. I meant specific vertical applications that are meant to replace common excel use cases.
I’ve been part of efforts to evaluate tools like Wrike and Aha! as replacements for gnarly excel spreadsheets. A single meeting of the stakeholders (managers of affected teams, VPs, high level engineers) to consider some aspect of the purchase decision cost more in salary and opportunity cost than a year of the SaaS subscription. Actual adoption, implementation, and training turned the cost of the product into a rounding error.
A: "You're not compliant, what the hell were you thinking using this 'Trello' thingie ?!?"
B: "You're not compliant but it's fine, everyone uses Microsoft like you do so it's probably not possible to be fully OK, we are all in the same boat..."
Feedback B can easily go up the chain with no repercussions. Feedback A cannot. It's a sad world.