Comment by MadnessASAP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MadnessASAP | Hacker News Reader

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How quickly can you connect to just about any arbitrary data source, pull a whole pile of data. Do some analytics on it and form it into a few glossy 8.5x11 for the next quarterly review. You're looking at about 30-60 minutes for an experienced Excel user. How about making it update in near realtime and adding some interaction for manipulating the data?

More importantly, can you teach an analyst of some sort, who while being a power user is not a programmer to do it just as efficiently?

Doing math on a 2D grid of cells is the technology that Excel perfected in the 80s, the power of Excel is in the connectors, services, and interoperability that surround it. It's no small feat to have an application that can guide a beginner through grabbing 10k rows out of an Oracle database and putting it on a graph, while also having the power to allow experienced users the ability join arbitrary sources and construct models around the results then present it in a logical fashion.

I am very much not a fan of the current state of affairs, but unfortunately nothing does Office like Microsoft Office.

Ecosystem, Developers, and entrenched education/skills win the day.

This doesn't seem like anything that Microsoft is doing in a monopolistic way, though. I'm sure LibreOffice could do this if they wanted to. I'm sort of surprised they don't, given LibreOffice presumably has access to JDBC.

> This doesn't seem like anything that Microsoft is doing in a monopolistic way, though.

That's the thing that I was wondering about here. I don't really know this space very well, and still have bad feelings toward Microsoft for their behavior in the 80s and 90s, but is MS actually abusing their monopoly position here? I guess the article hinted at a few things; e.g. if you are an Office365 customer you have to be an Azure customer, and can't run it on AWS or GCP. But I didn't see a compelling case for how MS is using its Excel (or Office as a whole) dominance to actually harm consumers or competitors. Excel's features aren't magic and AFAIK don't require backroom deals to enable. Anyone can implement them, given a lot of time and hard work.

I think the main compelling part was that MS doesn't have an incentive to focus on security as much as they should, because people will keep using Office365 regardless, as there are no viable alternatives. But that doesn't seem like an anti-trust issue to me. That's fixable through legally-mandated fines for security incidents, fines that actually hurt MS significantly, not just token fines that are shrugged off as the cost of doing business. Make it significantly cheaper for MS to develop a better security posture, and they probably will do just that.

> I don't really know this space very well, and still have bad feelings toward Microsoft for their behavior in the 80s and 90s, but is MS actually abusing their monopoly position here?

It's not illegal to have a monopoly, but one thing that's illegal (theoretically anyway) us using your monopoly in one area to gain market share in another area.

But it is kind of counter-intuitive to say that the linchpin of the entire Microsoft juggernaut fundamentally rests on their amazingly functional spreadsheet (which it sort of sounds like constitutes an actually useable "no-code" platform). Supposing that were true, what would be the strategy for people trying to bring about "The Year of the Linux Desktop"? Try to get LibreOffice or Gnumeric up to parity? Or try to get documentation / education for Jupyter / Python up to parity?

If I had to point a finger at something I'd say it's probably how they bundle everything, market everything, have cultured decades of cult-like loyalty in business IT employees, and so on.

That is, aside from the bundling I'm not sure MS has done anything particularly illegal or immoral? Just incredibly good business sense.

And I say that as someone with a stubborn disdain for microsoft lol.

I have the same issue. I also don't like MS, mostly for Azure reasons, but companies are sleepwalking into lock-in, for the reason you state: IT people are mostly Windows/AD/Exchange-centric, and Azure looks a little more like those tools. They're not being forced there.

My worry is nebulous: Microsoft is somehow buying its way into everything - AI, OSS development, gaming, etc, and it feels insidious.

However, it doesn't feel illegal at all. Governments might fancy some cash, and it's their right to write some rules to get that cash, but I don't see how in practice Microsoft is doing much obviously wrong.

> the power of Excel is in the connectors, services, and interoperability that surround it.

Hell, Excel still has the absolute best text/csv import of any spreadsheet I’ve used.

Fixed versus delimited columns. Arbitrary delimiters. And best of all, split existing column on delimiter to create multiple columns.

None of these are that fancy of functions. And there’s no reason why every other spreadsheet couldn’t implement them. But they don’t.

Maybe because it’s not sexy. Maybe because of bias against spreadsheets. I don’t know. I just wish Excel competitors would add them.

Its amazing how many products have little moats like this. Things that are days to at most weeks away from adding to any product, but that no other product seems to care enough about to build.

The csv importer of Libre Office is fine. Excel gets the staying power because it's already in the contracts for all things Microsoft. I think Teams is the new powerhouse that makes the office suite indispensable in large offices.

At home environment Google Sheets works just fine.

> Doing math on a 2D grid of cells is the technology that Excel perfected in the 80s

Lotus 1-2-3 gets that specific credit, I think. But Excel is so much more than that (for good or ill).

Visicalc would have been the first. In the early years of the PC, Visicorp was bigger than Microsoft -- mostly from their sales on the Apple II. They never had much success on the PC platform, which is where Lotus ate their lunch.

Yeah, "first on micros" definitely goes to VisiCalc. But "perfected in the 80s" I definitely think goes to Lotus. And while Microsoft was a contemporary developer of spreadsheet software, Excel didn't become dominant until the 90s.

"Microsoft released the first version of Excel for the Macintosh on September 30, 1985, and the first Windows version was 2.05 (to synchronize with the Macintosh version 2.2) on November 19, 1987"

I’m sorry, did Microsoft really design Excel for the Mac first?

It is indeed true. Windows had only just been released at this point, and was still limited by running MS-DOS in something of a pseudo-multitasking mode. The Macintosh platform, however, was slightly more mature, having already been publicly available for a little over a year.

The majority of Microsoft's software was being written to target non-Microsoft platforms at this point, which started to change with their increasingly anti-competitive marketing techniques (such as the so-called 'AARD code'[1] in 1991).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code

Yes. Excel for Mac was actually released before Windows.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Windows

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel

As a side note to the sibling comments, Microsoft's spreadsheet product for DOS was named Multiplan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplan .

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