You're listing widely used products, not great products. Fast food is not great just because it's popular.
This seems to be the problem with engineers: “I use eMacs on Linux so that’s the greatest product for everyone.”
In theory Apple has the resources to do this, but "Microsoft compatibility mode" and "backwards compatible forever" are anathema to their brand, so they don't. Google, by contrast, has actually made an effort and taken a huge bite out of Office market share. You might even say the product is better. But it's still not 100% compatible, and there are companies not willing to put their most sensitive private data on somebody else's cloud, so there are still plenty of companies stuck with Microsoft -- not because it's great, but because there is no great alternative.
It's certainly worse" than than the desktop office apps for some use cases.
> improvement via support contracts
Which might end up being effectively more expensive than paying for MS Office licenses.
You can add "for some use cases" and make the sentence true about any product in comparison to any other product. That's not what makes something great.
> Which might end up being effectively more expensive than paying for MS Office licenses
You're now comparing two entirely different things. With a support contract you get support. It's something different than the product itself with independent additional value.
I was thinking about you needing to pay someone to add new features/fix bugs or just help you to reimplement the workflows which you already have on Excel.
> any product in comparison to any other product. That's not what makes something great
I was thinking about many common workflows and general "power user" stuff that's very important for many professional users.
It's like saying that Apple Numbers is not "inferior" to Excel/Sheets because it's a different product and that it's perfectly sufficient (maybe even superior) for certain workflows, however that doesn't change the fact that it's objectively inferior from the perspective of significant proportion of people who are working with spreadsheets.
The idea is fantastic. Programmers are too harsh on excel.
Unfortunately Microsoft haven't really updated excel in decades. They've added tweaks here and there, and made a really clumsy attempt at integrating python, but it's potential is shockingly untapped considering it's at getting on for twice as old as me.
It's not good for you, as a consumer. As a company, it's a trillion dollar market, nurturing some of the largest companies in the world.
Just the other day on here I mentioned BeOS/Haiku OS, the tech vision on that thing is astounding but it simply did not pan out into any sort of market success. Same with parts of Commodore, IBM, NeXT. MS did capitalize and manipulate the market to assist themselves and keep competitors out, but just becaused they won doesn't mean they had the best technology.