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. Replace the CTO with somebody that can hire IT that doesn't depend on the crutches of Microsoft.
If people's MS subscription revenue were funneled into on-site devs and devops for open source solutions, we'd all live in a better world. Sure, the money wouldn't be funneled to a single ledger in Redmond, but the overall productivity would be higher and there'd be greater GDP growth in other areas.
I've heard of so many small companies with a slightly technical bent replacing their SalesForce with better CRMs that make everyone happier, thanks to AI. MS is next.
Let's make sure that dollars get funneled away from economic rent and into more productive efforts. Schumpeterian rents might exist for a bit, but they should never exist long. Microsoft's rents have lasted for too long to be economically optimal.
bix6 32 minutes ago [-]
What’s your Excel replacement solution?
epistasis 28 minutes ago [-]
Excel was always an antipattern for me, I work with biological data, which Excel until recently couldn't even import without data corruption [1]
If it's necessary to recreate all the keyboard shortcuts for Excel like Emacs has done with evil-mode for vim, maybe that works, I don't know.
Hell the finance guys can almost make their own replacement on their own today, with AI.
I think you are massively underestimating the engineering effort of replacing Excel in large organizations. I don’t think the finance guys can reliably vibe-code an alternative to a massive product that’s at the core of their operations.
Handling simultaneous edits, guaranteeing correctness, handling massive data sets… as amazing as AI is, this is a huge can of worms.
Buttons840 10 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, we wont be one-shotting stuff like this for a least another year or maybe even two! (This is a risky prediction, but I made it.)
ph4rsikal 4 minutes ago [-]
Excel is still the tool in Finance.
It is the database, the visualization, the calculation enginer, the collaboration tool, and many other things all rolled into one.
bix6 27 minutes ago [-]
So your suggestion is to make an Excel clone with AI?
epistasis 26 minutes ago [-]
What other option is there?
Edit: actually I think there's got to be a far better and completely different UI that's possible now with AI. There has to be something better. What is it? I don't know. Some clever specialist will invent it.
jimbokun 15 minutes ago [-]
But then you’re still just using a vibe coded Excel. Maybe you save a little bit on subscription costs, but that’s probably swamped by other costs.
ggm 28 minutes ago [-]
Peyton-Jones says excel is demonstrably FP so UI aside (which is SAMOP) Haskell seems sensible especially for the finance team.
mlazos 8 minutes ago [-]
This would be an unmitigated disaster - most programmers have trouble with Haskell, I can’t imagine saying hey finance guys here’s an LLM and Haskell figure it out when they’re used to using a full on application with UX. It’s actually so crazy I feel like you’re joking.
bix6 26 minutes ago [-]
FP and SAMOP mean what? Your suggestion is to use a programming language to replace excel?
ggm 23 minutes ago [-]
FP means functional programming and SAMOP means "simply a matter of programming" and the humour appears to be a Whoosh moment. Cell based spreadsheet programming is good, and should be portable. But people code to Microsoft bugs.
bix6 21 minutes ago [-]
Sorry so many people making unrealistic solutions, I missed that this was humor.
17 minutes ago [-]
0c3ca83 18 minutes ago [-]
That's like saying, "UI aside, a car is just wheels and an engine, so drivers should break out the welders instead of relying on big auto"
hoppp 28 minutes ago [-]
What about libreoffice calc?
erelong 5 minutes ago [-]
maybe this could be used as a base and people could use AI to create extra features they need on top of it if there are things missing that Excel has that they want
bix6 24 minutes ago [-]
That is the only legit solution I’ve heard so far. What is your experience with it? A worthy replacement?
ghaff 13 minutes ago [-]
No. Excel really doesn't have an equivalent replacement. Other parts of the office suite do although if you're a lawyer (revision marking) or have other specific integration needs, you probably need Word.
If you're just doing lists with maybe some simple calcs (which is what most people use spreadsheets for most of the time), pretty much anything works.
palata 8 minutes ago [-]
May I ask for a few examples of things you do in Excel that don't have a replacement?
The vast majority of people I have seen using Excel don't know how to write a formula. Now they just started copy-pasting whatever ChatGPT was telling them to copy-paste, but well... and anyway all the alternatives do support formulas of course.
conceptme 16 minutes ago [-]
It works with csv which is totally broken in excel
Fraterkes 27 minutes ago [-]
The serious answer here is that a lot of MS products have kindof dual purpose: they are 90% used for very simple stuff (collecting data into a spreadsheet, having a text editor that allows basic styling), and 10% stuff that power users rely on (huge excel files with complicated formulas for data transformation and visualization, word / ppt templates with byzantine branding). The answer is that for the simple stuff you rely on open / cheap alternatives, and for the complex stuff (eg visualizing and transforming data for non-programmers, generating presentations and branded text documents) you can just ask ai now.
HFguy 23 minutes ago [-]
For complex stuff you cannot just always ask ai now.
Fraterkes 9 minutes ago [-]
I have mixed feelings about ai, but I think that word and powerpoint, as tools, are undeniably awful.
moffkalast 25 minutes ago [-]
> you rely on open / cheap alternatives
Big business kind of wants 24/4 support that those will not be providing at all though? Plus the various nonsense certifications. I mean try to convince anyone in corporate to use Libre and they'll probably just laugh.
(not that they would ever use that support, they just want to have someone to scapegoat lol)
bix6 25 minutes ago [-]
So your suggestion is a text editor? And ask AI for anything complex?
KPGv2 28 minutes ago [-]
R and Python are both obvious replacements for data processing, and having the data itself appear in read-write columns of an Excel file is and has always been ludicrous.
Excel was for a time when programming meant more arcane languages. In 2026, there is no excuse for a business major not to know Python or R. They're both easy.
jimbokun 14 minutes ago [-]
They are not nearly as easy as Excel, even for people who know those other languages well.
dist-epoch 13 minutes ago [-]
I don't think you understand what Excel is and what it does.
bix6 23 minutes ago [-]
So your suggestion is replace excel with python and R? So when I send someone a spreadsheet instead I send them… a python script?
HFguy 20 minutes ago [-]
I feel some of these people posting have not thought too hard and/or don’t understand the actual requirements here.
Also Excel is probably the best thing MS produces. There is lower hanging fruit elsewhere
karmakurtisaani 9 minutes ago [-]
Excel is the best product I would never want to work with.
Why are you recommending unfinished software that you don’t even use… that’s not a legitimate solution.
realusername 24 minutes ago [-]
I'm already using the Word one and I feel like it's better than the original so I'm guessing Excel is at a similar level of quality.
HFguy 14 minutes ago [-]
These products all have super deep feature sets. This might meet basic editing needs. There is zero chance they have replicated the full feature set. Word for example has a ton of functionality for lawyers.
I can tell you all of the Excel alternatives are extremely disappointing.
bix6 22 minutes ago [-]
Ok fair. Anyone here have experience with the excel clone?
gonzalohm 17 minutes ago [-]
What do you mean? This has been in development since October 2026. That's a whole month. In the age of AI that's pretty solid.
And the 3k commits in a month, all good signs
/s
Rygian 22 minutes ago [-]
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.
ThrowawayB7 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
O3marchnative 29 minutes ago [-]
One can only hope everything you've laid out comes to fruition.
drivebyhooting 31 minutes ago [-]
Depends how you do it.
You could easily replace MS rent with OpenAnthroogle rent instead.
ggm 27 minutes ago [-]
I'm stealing that neologism and claiming it as my own.
bsenftner 38 minutes ago [-]
Trust in others, across the board, is tanking. I expect in the not to distant future every company will have a completely proprietary stack, or they will be facing competition circling them while they can't keep their shit running. It is the mono culture that is too easily attacked.
Buttons840 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
As PRs get beefier I find myself using the LLM to ask pointed questions and do general surveys of the diff to flag architectural violations, smells, etc. before I read through the entire thing by hand. If you put all of your architectural and business decisions in the repo via spec-driven tools or otherwise then this becomes quite useful. It also helps if you have a vision in your head of what the system is supposed to look like structurally so you can ask the LLM specifically how the PR is handling things that you'd be on the lookout for anyway.
jam0wal 17 minutes ago [-]
I feel this is missing the role we play. Choosing free, flashy, new and jumping on the new best thing in droves.
Unfortunately the most effective way to learn about what is important is to have it taken away. So I don't believe this is going to change ... ever.
erelong 9 minutes ago [-]
backup plans should be discussed (both backing up the data and alternative services to use when services go down), and also switching to better alternatives to Microsoft when possible
vfclists 4 minutes ago [-]
Big tech isn't here to let anyone down, it is your company executives and administrators who are here to let you down.
I have never understood why companies chose to standardize on Microsoft everything then switch the businesses to Microsoft Cloud everything in the belief that it was cheaper and better, simply because they don't want to pay money for onsite administrators or local IT guys for their IT. I mean if you want to use Microsoft Office then by regular licenses and run them on premises, but everything in the cloud who thought of that?
Many employees also don't know that their bosses or bosses bosses were also given kickbacks to switch their IT to Microsoft/Google/Oracle centralized services. For some obscure reason company bosses and government institutions still switch to Oracle for their services which don't work, wind up with Oracle negotiating with them for money for services which don't work, then they pay termination fees to Oracle if they bail out early.
Another factor I believe to be at work here is large investment firms like Blackrock, State Street etc pressuring the executives of companies which they are major shareholders in to switch their IT to the IT companies they are major shareholders in, therefore boosting the values of their stocks. For me it is the main reason for this centralization of IT services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
As someone who started using AWS from the time it went beta, I could see the value in it, but I couldn't see why companies had to switch their systems wholesale to it. I could see the benefits for new startups which had to move quickly and early and perhaps have a need for unexpected traffic, but even after some time the stuff would have to move back onsite once things settled down.
Other the end of the day the situation is entirely down to greed and corruption masking as incompetence.
A week or 2 ago in the UK virtually all the major banks went down due to some problems at Google, Microsoft or one of the other companies. So many banks had their IT hosted with them so everything went down simultaneously.
It is time the governments passed legislation forcing these banks not to centralize their IT with these companies and ensure they have their own independent redundant systems. Maybe they should go back to IBM mainframes or something.
coffeebeqn 21 minutes ago [-]
It’s interesting I have been 0% affected by this big outage at home or work
hoppp 29 minutes ago [-]
Many EU countries started moving away.. and then failed to do so and doubled down on Microsoft again.
ggm 26 minutes ago [-]
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.
singpolyma3 29 minutes ago [-]
Blaming every downtime on "vibecoding, probably" is so weird and lazy. As if these places never had downtime previously
mglvsky 4 minutes ago [-]
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
p2detar 11 minutes ago [-]
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."
Lazy maybe, but not weird at all. Probably true most of the time.
Legend2440 3 minutes ago [-]
You have no evidence for that. You just wish it was AI's fault because you hate AI and hope it comes back to bite them.
gonzalohm 16 minutes ago [-]
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
ArcHound 29 minutes ago [-]
I'm probably going to get a lot of flak here, but if the damages are that all emails have to wait for a day twice in a year, then that's quite a good product.
While we can engineer a system with better availability, seems the market is quite ok with one or two nines for this.
So the trick would be not to make anything truly critical depend on such a service. And no, payroll is not enough, I'm talking OT.
busymom0 4 minutes ago [-]
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.
cisc 60 minutes ago [-]
> Now, are Microsoft going to offer any compensation for either lost business or additional accrued costs?
The NSA lost control of EternalBlue which resulted in billions of dollars of economic damage globally:
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.
LastTrain 9 minutes ago [-]
Seems just as likely that LMMs will have the opposite effect.
redanddead 49 minutes ago [-]
Zero-days are the least of our worries in the late 2020s and early 2030s
Legend2440 46 minutes ago [-]
On the other hand, nation-states will be able to run massive GPU clusters full of LLMs dedicated to cyberwarfare. They certainly have the resources to do it.
Imagine the Huggingface incident, but with an agent swarm that's deliberately malicious instead of just misaligned.
myth_drannon 2 minutes ago [-]
yes, that's why US is so keen on preventing China getting the gpus.
And Israel is so bent on all AI. Trumendous advantages over the countries like Iran who will have to basically become hermit kingdoms to protect themselves.
nullsanity 26 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
moffkalast 21 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
bix6 30 minutes ago [-]
Feels like we are entering the fall of this crop of mega corps. Between Apple’s absolutely garbage software, Microsoft’s complete incompetence, and Meta’s endless lawsuits… finally time for a little creative destruction?
karmakurtisaani 5 minutes ago [-]
Don't forget the reckless data center spend. To me that's the most likely candidate for their fall.
nikisweeting 52 minutes ago [-]
Holy cow another Sweeting! I wonder if we are related?
Edit: and you've spent time in Shanghai too! Small world!
disce-pati 48 minutes ago [-]
tangentially i happen to know someone with the last name Sweet. i wonder if it diverged somewhere along the way.
photochemsyn 41 minutes ago [-]
When your necessary compute is controlled by rentier capitalists, and you’ve had the option to switch to compute not controlled by rentier capitalists for years, who do you really have to blame but yourself?
stego-tech 49 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been enjoying a piping hot cup of “I told you so” every morning this week, it feels like.
“Microsoft is too big to go down, why do we need a redundancy?” Another round, barkeep.
“Amazon won’t ever have downtime, they’re huge! Our workloads are much safer there.” Make that two, what with MEC1-AZ2 being a smoking hole.
“Why would we need backups when these providers offer us a five-nines SLA?” Sorry, make that three, since Google’s EU-WEST-2-B AZ lost power and its redundancies failed to start.
Now don’t get me wrong, nothing is perfect or bulletproof. That being said, the more eggs you put into a single basket, the more of them get damaged if something happens to said basket.
Everyone lost the plot on backups, redundancy, and diversification in favor of single, “do it all” providers and hyperscalers.
What could possibly go wrong?
0xDECAFC0FFEE 3 minutes ago [-]
> 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
SturgeonsLaw 28 minutes ago [-]
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.
4 minutes ago [-]
classified 38 minutes ago [-]
"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.
Rendered at 21:41:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
If people's MS subscription revenue were funneled into on-site devs and devops for open source solutions, we'd all live in a better world. Sure, the money wouldn't be funneled to a single ledger in Redmond, but the overall productivity would be higher and there'd be greater GDP growth in other areas.
I've heard of so many small companies with a slightly technical bent replacing their SalesForce with better CRMs that make everyone happier, thanks to AI. MS is next.
Let's make sure that dollars get funneled away from economic rent and into more productive efforts. Schumpeterian rents might exist for a bit, but they should never exist long. Microsoft's rents have lasted for too long to be economically optimal.
If it's necessary to recreate all the keyboard shortcuts for Excel like Emacs has done with evil-mode for vim, maybe that works, I don't know.
Hell the finance guys can almost make their own replacement on their own today, with AI.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/one-five-genetics-pa...
Handling simultaneous edits, guaranteeing correctness, handling massive data sets… as amazing as AI is, this is a huge can of worms.
Edit: actually I think there's got to be a far better and completely different UI that's possible now with AI. There has to be something better. What is it? I don't know. Some clever specialist will invent it.
If you're just doing lists with maybe some simple calcs (which is what most people use spreadsheets for most of the time), pretty much anything works.
The vast majority of people I have seen using Excel don't know how to write a formula. Now they just started copy-pasting whatever ChatGPT was telling them to copy-paste, but well... and anyway all the alternatives do support formulas of course.
Big business kind of wants 24/4 support that those will not be providing at all though? Plus the various nonsense certifications. I mean try to convince anyone in corporate to use Libre and they'll probably just laugh.
(not that they would ever use that support, they just want to have someone to scapegoat lol)
Excel was for a time when programming meant more arcane languages. In 2026, there is no excuse for a business major not to know Python or R. They're both easy.
Also Excel is probably the best thing MS produces. There is lower hanging fruit elsewhere
Unfortunately I have to.
I can tell you all of the Excel alternatives are extremely disappointing.
And the 3k commits in a month, all good signs
/s
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.
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
Unfortunately the most effective way to learn about what is important is to have it taken away. So I don't believe this is going to change ... ever.
I have never understood why companies chose to standardize on Microsoft everything then switch the businesses to Microsoft Cloud everything in the belief that it was cheaper and better, simply because they don't want to pay money for onsite administrators or local IT guys for their IT. I mean if you want to use Microsoft Office then by regular licenses and run them on premises, but everything in the cloud who thought of that?
Many employees also don't know that their bosses or bosses bosses were also given kickbacks to switch their IT to Microsoft/Google/Oracle centralized services. For some obscure reason company bosses and government institutions still switch to Oracle for their services which don't work, wind up with Oracle negotiating with them for money for services which don't work, then they pay termination fees to Oracle if they bail out early.
Another factor I believe to be at work here is large investment firms like Blackrock, State Street etc pressuring the executives of companies which they are major shareholders in to switch their IT to the IT companies they are major shareholders in, therefore boosting the values of their stocks. For me it is the main reason for this centralization of IT services into Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
As someone who started using AWS from the time it went beta, I could see the value in it, but I couldn't see why companies had to switch their systems wholesale to it. I could see the benefits for new startups which had to move quickly and early and perhaps have a need for unexpected traffic, but even after some time the stuff would have to move back onsite once things settled down.
Other the end of the day the situation is entirely down to greed and corruption masking as incompetence.
A week or 2 ago in the UK virtually all the major banks went down due to some problems at Google, Microsoft or one of the other companies. So many banks had their IT hosted with them so everything went down simultaneously.
It is time the governments passed legislation forcing these banks not to centralize their IT with these companies and ensure they have their own independent redundant systems. Maybe they should go back to IBM mainframes or something.
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.
"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
Right?
As opposed to a pile of unmaintainable shit
While we can engineer a system with better availability, seems the market is quite ok with one or two nines for this.
So the trick would be not to make anything truly critical depend on such a service. And no, payroll is not enough, I'm talking OT.
The NSA lost control of EternalBlue which resulted in billions of dollars of economic damage globally:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EternalBlue
They didn't offer any compensation either.
Imagine the Huggingface incident, but with an agent swarm that's deliberately malicious instead of just misaligned.
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.
Edit: and you've spent time in Shanghai too! Small world!
“Microsoft is too big to go down, why do we need a redundancy?” Another round, barkeep.
“Amazon won’t ever have downtime, they’re huge! Our workloads are much safer there.” Make that two, what with MEC1-AZ2 being a smoking hole.
“Why would we need backups when these providers offer us a five-nines SLA?” Sorry, make that three, since Google’s EU-WEST-2-B AZ lost power and its redundancies failed to start.
Now don’t get me wrong, nothing is perfect or bulletproof. That being said, the more eggs you put into a single basket, the more of them get damaged if something happens to said basket.
Everyone lost the plot on backups, redundancy, and diversification in favor of single, “do it all” providers and hyperscalers.
What could possibly go wrong?
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'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.