[wmab]

This is a well researched article touching on some key points as to why Excel lives on. Interesting for me is the unbundling of Excel, and the birth of many B2B SaaS products. I'm not sure Excel was ever the right program to generate many of these products, and so it makes sense someone built a specific program to house it (product boards, CRMs, calendars all fall in this imo). Others however, absolutely, I'm not sure the long term value in some products that can simply be done in Excel - often when a startup goes after one of these verticals it's hard to create value for the user and the business, because by building a product you are by definition limiting the potential/power of the program by limiting what it can do. So you're asking someone to pay for something that is more limited than it's Excel-cousin, but might be simpler to use and look prettier. An example to me of this is financial modeling / flightpath type apps for businesses. Instead of paying for a bunch of saas, maybe a company should go back to hiring more Excel ninjas, ergo Excel Never Dies.