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Comment by raxxorrax | Hacker News Reader

This is basically intentionally sabotaging their own ecosystems. Try to find an expert on Microsoft technology and you will find an army of consultant grifters instead of technical knowledge. The problem seems to be getting worse. I think without the momentum of their office suite, corporate integration and PC gaming, Windows would probably quickly fade out.

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It may sound unrealistic, but, this article and the overall tendencies in MS products gave me a weird idea that indeed someone in the position of power has decided to gradually bury Windows as a platform and shift people to Linux. Sounds like a nerd dream, but, something doesn't seem right with all of this...

Because it will be in the form of a locked down android or chromebook-alike, where you don't have root/admin access or control of the device. Turns out Richard Stallman was right again Tivoization is bad. To bad Stallman has the charisma of well Stallman rather than say Jobs, the world would be a better place.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Microsoft is not an ally Linux needs.

It may be that the cost of maintaining this humongous pile of legacy code isn't justified by the revenues they think they can extract from it.

I think this is the right answer, compared with something the grandgrandparent touched upon: windows apps from third party vendors do not act as competitive advantage anymore. (This us also due to how Windows OEM contracts work.)

As soon as someone gets a better product than MS excel for the finance community they are in tough waters for relevancy. Gaming is the other one you pointed out.

I think this would be one of those you have to make it 5-10x better than the old product. Someone who spent ins and outs of learning Excel aren't going to move to anything new unless it is FAR better than Excel.

Is anyone seriously working on an Excel competitor, and not just clone? Serious question.

The problem is that every Excel user is an Excel native. Your product would have to be magnitudes better than Excel to compensate for the cost of forcing everyone to give up their fluency in the software.

It can be better. I am no mac user but from what I have seen, Apple's excel competitor has this concept that instead of an excel tab being a single grid, it is a canvas on which you can add tables, charts, etc. As a fairly advanced excel user, this makes so much more sense than Excel's approach.

VBA is kind of a wart in Office, hasn't been updated since 1998. They made an attempt of integrating a mini visual studio in Office with C#/VB.net (VSTA), then killed it.

I see many no code alternative poping up (Microsoft power suite, alteryx, etc). But all have a pretty steep learning curve, and frankly the people who are willing to invest the time to learn them migh as well pick up SQL or even python for the same effort.

"Numbers" is an abysmal product.

I don't really use it, would be curious to know why?

It's not even close to being complete. Best described as "My First Spreadsheet". Excel (even libreoffice) are better by factors of 10.

Easy way to get some serious premiums from MSFT buying your company if you ever tried to build a viable competitor. That said though you would watch your product get deep sixed if you sold

The entire low-code/no-code markets are Excel competitors.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAICT no-code is just vaporware, while Excel is being used right now practically everywhere.

There are plenty of no-code tools around. People use them every day.

You will probably not like them, but that doesn't make them vaporware.

I admit my ignorance. Care to share the name of the most popular ones?

I've never agreed more with a Hacker News comment, about the "certified Microsoft experts".... does anyone know what led to this army of grifters?

Are their certifications just too easy to pass? Should they not have certifications and just have internal support teams?

Are Amazon AWS consultants turning into the same thing or does Amazon somehow do this process differently?

>I think without the momentum of their office suite, corporate integration and PC gaming, Windows would probably quickly fade out.

Also the entire line of Adobe and Autodesk products. Photo editing, vector graphics and CAD in any form seems to be badly under served in Linux.

Even in their 'modern' solutions such as Intune, the licensing models are so arcane and difficult to grow that you basically need an expert to figure it out. Microsoft really leans on their VAR network and I agree, it feels so inefficient

> the licensing models are so arcane and difficult to grow that you basically need an expert to figure it out

This. Just had a call with MS today on a different matter, and the guy basically had no idea how licensing worked. All he could say was something like "we don't actively enforce those, so if you don't do anything ridiculous, we won't come banging on your door. But you should schedule a call with our licensing specialist who'll be able to help you out, just to be sure".

When you compare the sales of Android devices to the sale of PCs, in a sense Windows has already faded out.

Aside from roads, clean water, etc., what have the Romans done for us? ;)

Perhaps they did a lot but their realm stopped existing some time ago. The reasons are still in dispute, so I don't know if it was due to advertising.

If the Romans were good people, they'd have shared the tech without all the killing/conquering.

If wishes were fishes, nobody would go hungry.

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