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All roads lead to Excel. When you try to make a nice dashboard in Jira that incorporated custom fields and all the data was normalized, nope - they send out an excel spreadsheet every time. They do this to any tool you try to use as a group tool to update things - like Confluence. Before you know it it's back in Excel again and you have multiple sources that keep getting lost.

I think the criticism this post makes applies regardless of how you get your spreadsheets. It would apply equally to Google Workspace.

Plus, I guess there are office 365 outages, but the outage I personally hear more chatter about is the hosted exchange services (outlook), you will still need an email server in a post ai world, right?

What’s your Excel replacement solution?

The idea that small companies would have fewer problems if they had to debug vibecoded software is badly misguided.

> In the age of AI there's ZERO reason for "the global North" to continue using Microsoft.

They own 27% of OpenAI. I don't think that having all of them swap to ChatGPT is necessarily going to have the effect you're hoping.

The problem is never Excel, its user and permissions management. Apart from Google Suite there is not really any other one stop shop for all of that, and definitly nothing open source (for now)...

You write in the imperative, as if advising a leader.

However, leaders are advised by their underlings, who are swayed by their technical officers, who are charmed by the commercial arm of corporations.

The only effective path to actual change is to charm the technical officers with a product that is strictly superior in the metrics they care about. They'll then work their way up the chain.

With respect: you're a biologist, and your experience with backoffice software requirements is probably the same as my experience with biochemistry: near total ignorance.

There are exabytes of documents in Microsoft formats that can be at best "read" with a significant level of data corruption in other products (formatting errors). Writing them back out with shredding them is hit & miss at best. Entire MS products have no equivalent at all that can open their file formats, such as MS Access and Power BI.

Word isn't just paragraphs, italic, and bold.

Excel has features you probably have never even heard of, but people use at scale. Things like tabular data connections using OData. It's the front-end for SQL Server Analysis Services. It has the Mashup columnar engine from Power BI built in to it. Etc, etc, etc.

These things are massive products, with deep integrations across each other, third-party software, third-party plugins, cloud products, and on and on.

There's easily several million man-years of effort sunk into the Microsoft Office ecosystem.

Switching costs are not a matter of failing to "somehow convince" people to switch.

The switching costs are on the order of trillions of dollars, not a decision to be taken lightly.

Here's some critical points everybody normally ignores in these discussion:

1) Partial switching doesn't help, because now you have two problems!

2) Everyone else has to switch too. Google Workspace people were laughing during the Outlook outage, eeeeexcept... they couldn't send or receive emails either -- because their business partners, vendors, and customers likely used Outlook.

3) The alternative with the same features, same level of integration, same commercial support, etc... is the same thing, with the same problems, but just a different brand.

You can't escape the reality of this, it is what it is, there's no nirvana that we could all achieve if we "just" did something "simple".

More likely than Excel getting replaced is that agents and users collaborate through Excel.

> In the age of AI there's ZERO reason for "the global North" to continue using Microsoft. Wean your finance guys off of Excel, somehow.

What does AI have to do with it? Are you proposing that we replace Excel for accounting purposes with something vibecoded? That sounds a bit nuts to me. You can pay a bit of money for mature software that will probably not fail to add 2 + 2 correctly and will not run away with your wife, so why give that up?

I actually suspect that companies such as Microsoft pushing for AI everywhere may undermine that proposition... but then, the alternative is probably LibreOffice Calc, which is eminently boring and doesn't have Copilot popping up.

After 30+ years of hearing this type of twaddle, it's more likely for Microsoft to keel over because of its own leadership incompetence than to be so much as dented by any of these half-baked community efforts.

One can only hope everything you've laid out comes to fruition.

The finance team would give up cocaine before MS Excel. And they would give up water before cocaine. Now you know how important Excel is.

Office 365 is the cheapest solution. Its five subscriptions (email, office software, storage, chat/calls) bundled into one 11 euro/month deal.

Depends how you do it. You could easily replace MS rent with OpenAnthroogle rent instead.

Unless you spin up an entire devops team plus an ML team to run inference at scale in-house, you're just changing where you funnel your subscription money.

Also: No home-grown CRM will have, in the long run, uptimes anywhere approaching e.g. Office365. You're just smearing one large outage into a lot more small ones, plus a few data losses.

That rent buys you something. The internal development buys you something very different. You might want to make a reasoned call on what you're buying instead of making GDP predictions.

The ONLY WAY to get rid of MS Excel is to make something better and then literally force feed it to the finance folks who will go kicking and screaming all the way.

It is entirely likely that with AI, you could just spin up the whole 'stack' as you need it without depending on external services. AI will truly drive the cost of software generation to zero.

Programmers are "program reviewers" now, more and more.

But the tools we have to do this suck. We don't have much beyond "here's the source code as text, look at it, and think really hard".

Another comment[0] suggested having AI generate "code walks" through the code. This seems better than our current approach of "my PR contains a diff, good luck".

I'm working on a tool in Emacs that allows me to mark certain lines, or entire projects, as needing review, and then helps me track which parts have been reviewed. I need something to help me find parts of the code I have never reviewed before.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50410493

There are older predictions than that...

"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." - Gerald Weinberg, 1970's

> let the market fix the mess which the central planners have created

Isn't a Microsoft dependency failure market-driven? Compared to the 1960's and 1970's, the present-day software industry is much more driven by the market than it is by the government.

Not only they are concentrating power in the hands of an oligopoly, but they're making the whole country unsafe. If everyone uses the same datacenters, it is enough to shut down a few of these data centers to bring civilization to a halt in this country. With the current AI trends, this risk is getting ever greater.

The real "central planners" are the billionaires who have led the way to oligopoly since the 80s. Not sure how handing them more power is going to help distribute it.

I've often wondered how much unplanned downtime is caused by the aversion to planned downtime.

Like if Exchange Online went down for an hour every Sunday for maintenance, and they made their network configuration change then, there would have been no cascading failure.

This is how you get enshittification. It'll never stop at a day every once in a while, unless we hold those with billions to a higher standard, instead of giving them excuses while the layoffs continue.

> I have never understood why companies chose to standardize on Microsoft

Exceedingly simple: those who decide don't know better.

That's kind of a partial misstatement. There's a huge problem in some parts of the stack, and there's massive (entirely legal) inducements to reattach to the Redmond teat.

There's only warm fuzzies for helping fix or find OSS but the drive for resilient systems hasn't died.

Other bits of the stack are fine. It's not a flat world.

Lazy maybe, but not weird at all. Probably true most of the time.

Indeed, given that there was a post this spring by ex-Microsoft employee on the poor state of Azure.

"The team had reached a point where it was too risky to make any code refactoring or engineering improvements. I submitted several bug fixes and refactoring, notably using smart pointers, but they were rejected for fear of breaking something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47616242

Sure, those takes are mostly lazy (some of my comments here included TBH). Although I have very weird feeling, that current zeitgeist is about "coding is solved", etc and the same time we have evidence that didn't help much regarding boring thing such as reliability

MSFT stated that they went all in on AI and had a key metric of generating more than a million LOC per developer at MSFT.

Now they have an outage that should honestly result in people going to prison, at some point we have to question leadership's ability to... well lead because unless something drastically changes I don't think society wants to deal with a massive transnational trillion+ corporation with various monopolies that controls many aspects of our lives if they're going to continue to give us shit service.

Right but according to some here AI is creating vast amounts of high quality code that should have given us 100% uptime in every service

Right?

As opposed to a pile of unmaintainable shit

Trying to control the narrative this way by preemptively talking about vibecoding is so weird and lazy.

I'm blaming the enshitification of absolutely everything. AI or not, it's all just become bloated piles of code.

Using AI is lazy. Lazy creators get lazy responses.

In the current world, a lot of things like 2FA depend upon emails. So emails not working means not being able to sign into systems.

Don't forget the reckless data center spend. To me that's the most likely candidate for their fall.

I do hope for a future where LLMs are so good at patching zero-days that the NSA and all other nation-state 'cyberwarfare' departments (ie software privateers) lose most their capability.

> The NSA was aware of this vulnerability but did not disclose it to Microsoft for several years, as it intended to use the exploit

This is why agents discovering vulns en masse is pretty great in the long run, it gets ahead of these sort of malicious hoarding shitheads with more resources than ethics.

tangentially i happen to know someone with the last name Sweet. i wonder if it diverged somewhere along the way.

I hope any Microsoft infra greyboards who were canned during these recent rounds of layoffs are feeling deservedly content as they watch what's left of Microsoft hoisting itself by its own petard.

It's clear from the wording of the updates that Microsoft took the better part of a day to even figure out what was happening, and that they're throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, instead of following the kind of precise recovery plan that they would have had, had they understood their own systems.

> MEC1-AZ2 being a smoking hole.

What do you expect amz to do about the drone strikes haha.

if you absolutely needed your servers in an active war zone for some reason cant imagine you'd have five 9s either

"It seemed like a good idea at the time", especially when the people holding the purse strings think it's cheaper that way. So we drive without a safety belt because a safety belt would cost money.