alt Hacker NewsIt’s hard to name a more pathological market than office suites. You have Microsoft which is lackadaisical about the subject, like maybe they think Office is a place to stuff with thoroughly unwanted AI features. The rest of the market is German zealots who spend all day with bash and emacs who lobby legislatures to subject public servants to off-brand office suites and then the public sector unions go on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
Bundling is one reason who can’t have nice things. Like in my opinion Excel is a lot worse than the others but if customers are thinking about a “suite” they are still going to buy Office to get Word and PowerPoint and can’t save money by switching to a different CSV wrangler or financial analysis tool.
Funny, my opinion is the opposite. Excel is a much better spreadsheet than Word is a word processor or than PowerPoint is a presentation tool.
Of course it’s got quirks and unfortunate relics of its long history, but I reach for it willingly, and I can’t say that about the rest of the Office suite.