A little off topic, but, if you'll indulge me: Why do you think nobody has been able to make a successful alternative to Photoshop? Everybody I know complains about it constantly, and yet it's still the industry standard.
I’ve never seen a superior product to either Photoshop or Excel. Have you? Maybe they’re on top because they really are good products.
For Photoshop I agree that no software has the same amount of tools built in. However I have been Happy with gimp ever since, and know plenty of people who prefer Krita or something because their interesting is in drawing and not design.
And the first time you need sheets to interact with any of the zillion excel spreadsheets running on the planet (all of finance and pretty much all of corporate America) and it fails and it costs you a contract, you'll switch immediately.
I'm guessing you really don't push either much at all.
Despite Sheets having a free version for almost 20 years, Excel sales are at all time highs. Go figure.
Edit:// I am not sure if increased sales means anything when they switched their license model so often and aggressive
If all you do is CSV things then you're not even a basic user of either. The power isn't a viewer for a table of data.
As to increased sales, I find it amusing where there's good evidence for a thing being true, and people not wanting it to be true make up the most fringe excuses. The fact is sales are up by a lot. If you're going to make handwave claims, demonstrate a fact that your excuse is an actual fact, not a wishful claim to save face. If anything, as the world does more and more data analysis, Excel is one of the most used tools, because it's good for that, so it also makes sense there is more, not less, demand for Excel. And if the license model pissed enough off there a completely free "alternative". Why don't they all jump ship if it's usable?
Occam's razor :)
I just did a search on indeed.com to see job listings with "microsoft excel", 500,000 hits. I did the same search with "google sheets", zero hits. Ouch.
Their company was successful too; Apple recently purchased them.
The speculation is that Apple will now compete with Adobe’s subscriptionware.
Gimp kind of has the Open Source issue where it has tons of features, yet there's a large wall of complexity, zillions of little fiddly knobs to tweak on almost every process, and the interface makes you feel like you need to, because they're all exposed immediately.
Photoshop (personal opinion) is better about having an initially functional feature, with relatively "what you expect" defaults, and then layers of fiddly knobs you can tweak if you "really" want to or need to for a project.
IMO Photoshop is just simpler because people are usually used to it. In reality Gimp always had a much more reliable UI