You mean the industries, that are liable for most of the initial suffering during the 1930s, 2000s and so on? A case could be made that some of it lead more or less directly to wars.
Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)
Spreadsheets are insanely versatile and useful. I think if you were to redesign a lot of the things they do as custom apps, you’d end up with poorer version of a spreadsheet, like you’re saying.
I’ve experienced this first-hand when building custom business apps. You’re building your UI in React or whatever only to conclude: “Fuck, this is a spreadsheet.”
Actually, at OrgPad.com my colleague Pavel (~Paul) is writing a collaborative editor in ClojureScript + re-frame/ Reagent/ React. There is even a very rough video about it (in Czech though) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkFJ1zcRjQY where you can see the current state of work, including the debugger Pavel has written. We will have some basic tables/ spreadsheets in the final version and we plan on having some very cool table calculation abilities later. ;-) So yeah, we thought about it.
Accounting and finance should know much, much better to use something actually auditable. Pretty much all software in any way associated with those industries that I have seen is at best average by enterprise software quality standards but most is barely useable. In that sense, Excel is probably the better choice. :-)