Wonder if and when we’ll see decent Excel/Word replacements from Amazon, perhaps coupled with a thin Linux distro. At that point you’d be able to completely do away with Microsoft in many organisations, and Amazon could simply gobble up those dollars. They’ve got enough money they could make it work.
Never. Can't happen. See, while it is true that 80% of the people only use 20% of the features but it is not the same 20%! The only viable Excel replacement would need to have the exact same functionality pile.
Google has been working on that for ~10 years, but still doesn't have a full replacement. Though it's about 80% there - we're a Google Docs office, but about 20% of employees (mostly finance and marketing) need real MS Office products.
I was a business analyst (excel grunt) for 2+ years in a biotech startup. Sheets is just different in enough ways to positively irk even the "casual power user" of Excel, IMO.
This. It'd be a hell of a project for Amazon, considering that they've done nothing in this direction as far as anyone knows, while Google has been working at it for a decade+, and is still a long way from a full replacement.
Decent Excel/Word replacements are a hard problem to solve. OOo/LibreOffice and Google Docs have been at it for a while, and aren't there. Meanwhile, I can't imagine wanting an Amazon office suite. I've used their video and music streaming services, and holy wow, the usability is awful. Their photo storage service is so pants compared to Microsoft or Google in terms of usability. I shudder to think what an Amazon equivalent of Google Docs would be like.
It isn't. But what do you replace it with? Better solutions are likely to only cover a fraction of use cases, so they really need to be stellar to win over users.
It's about the data, and the better solution is to use a database. The problem is that retraining everyone from Excel to use some sort of SQL frontend is not a small problem, and neither is getting the company to commit to operating a data warehouse.
It's really about the data though, and if the database has access to more data, and requires less work from analysts, it becomes a replacement for some work that was previously done in Excel, even if the system still supports exporting to CSV, for importing into Excel for the parts that the system does not support.
The system I am familiar with is Redshift, and we are able to generate daily or hourly graphs for various parts of the business with it.
