You can't escape excel. You can avoid Word, Powerpoint and every thing else... but Excel.
Love it or hate it - it runs financing thus it runs the world.
Love it or hate it - it runs financing thus it runs the world.
I'd still package all of office together. Maybe not excel on its own but I imagine office is already its own org inside Microsoft.
You are correct, it has been its own org for a long time.
I don’t see the decoupling from the rest of MSFT ever happening though. Working with some of the Office codebase and some adjacent ones years ago, it is so tightly coupled on a technical level to many other MSFT products, it is pretty much impossible to separate. At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that there is some level of Xbox code integration within Office, and I am only halfway joking here.
AD integration alone is so fundamental, without it the whole product starts falling apart. Hell, some of the code in SharePoint has hard dependencies on rather ancient Skype/Lync code, and some pieces of core functionality code are still hanging onto files that were last touched 10+ years ago. It was kind of a bittersweet feeling to have to edit a piece of code and reading comments, and then realizing that the most recent changes to it were submitted by your manager around a decade ago, back when they were just starting out their career as a software dev.
And let’s not even talk about Teams, which has its fangs set extremely deep all over Office products (and beyond).
It is also highly likely [1] that this is a very, very, bespoke deal and the user count is just an easy pricing model to use that the Amazon people can wrap their heads around and that Microsoft can recognize revenue from.
0 - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/fro...
1 - source: I used to be involved in crafting and negotiating these sorts of deals, although a bit smaller ($100m-ish vs $1b) and I've never done business with Amazon or Microsoft.
Finance hands some calculation spreadsheet to someone else, who then rolls it up to a department head who then tells another analyst to modify what the previous guy did because head didn't like it and so and and so forth.
The people most likely to never have to work with excel are IC engineers. If you're a manager, you likely have to do budgeting which goes to HR which goes to ... you guessed it - finance.
And you have to remember you're in a business org. If you need to read an excel file once a year, you'll want a license because you're part of Amazon - I mean my god I have to go find a separate computer with an Office license?! No way, just give me a license.
If your company uses Office, then your employees typically have their employee accounts managed through Active Directory. Which means that every single employee gets their own licensed Office seat, even if they don’t touch anything in the Office beyond email and Teams.
B: For warehouse operations, not everyone needs to be a user in AD
C: The comment above said there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets, which is what I responded to.
Do you agree that every employee needs work email access and some sort of a user account (for managing their benefits, interacting with payroll systems, etc.)?
If yes, then sure, it can be technically accomplished without AD. However, AD is an extremely well-suited system for managing incredibly large swaths of work accounts. And what’s the other option, running two separate user account management systems in parallel? That’s an insane amount of overhead managing and making sure it actually works. On Amazon scale, it would be a ton of money spent with very questionable results. Things aren’t that simple, and AD is an extremely powerful tool that can handle quite a lot of really quirky and intense scenarios.
> there are a million employees with 2-3 degrees of separation to finance in terms of exchanging spreadsheets
Finance employees are far from the only ones needing tools like spreadsheets/powerpoint/etc. What do you think devs use for writing and sharing design docs? What about presentations (which are used by pretty much everyone working in the corporate)? What about email? Do you think warehousing doesn’t use those at all?
Office is just straight up a good overall deal. You pay for a seat and you get all the Office tools (word/excel/etc), Teams, AD, Outlook, Onedrive/Sharepoint, etc. If your user touches even one of those, it makes sense to just say screw it and get a license seat for everyone, even from just the overhead costs perspective.
I am not saying that MS Office is the end-all. My current place uses Google offerings instead, but the general idea is the same.
> And what’s the other option, running two separate user account management systems in parallel? That’s an insane amount of overhead managing and making sure it actually works.
I've seen a large bank with THREE user account management systems in parallel, and two email systems. And they weren't alone in this way of setting things up.
* IBM RACF, for stuff that touched the mainframe
* MS AD for corporate employees and branch managers, they got Exchange email and Office
* OpenLDAP and some opensource email system for everybody else