I completely agree. Excel is the thing that keeps me tied to Windows (and no, the Mac version of Excel isn't the same). It is by far the best software I have used for small to medium complexity data analysis (at some point you have to pull out the really heavy lifting number crunching tools, but they have even less open source competition), and it is the only software I have used that meets most of my needs and is also approachable to relative beginners.
So in X years they'll be rocking their Palo server and a million lines in to OpenOffice Basic (also terrifying), wondering why more people don't use Google Wave v2.
Could you expand on this? What kind of "workflows" are you building? I can understand programming Excel, but how do you program Word and what do you use it for?
Visual Studio is not bad for people with little understanding of development. Unfortunately, CS schools turn out many people like that these days. I don't know why people want tools that get in the way and slow you down as much as Visual Studio, but it is popular.
To me, the built in unreliability of Windows is something I wonder why more people don't focus on. Building your business processes around something that needs proprietary tools that can disappear with little notice just seems crazy.
You do know that Visual Studio is not just a drag-and-drop visual designer tool right? This is the most insulting gibberish I've read all day.
I work mostly in Python, and that affects my view, I am sure. But, even when I did mostly c/c++, I knew it was useful to be able to ssh to a foreign machine, edit a file and recompile and execute a program.
The view I expresses is one I also hear from other developers. I cannot help how you perceive it, but it is still true.
Across all departments we have probably close to a million lines of VBA, COM, and VSTO code that we use most in Word and Excel. And a little for Outlook. And I just recently, like last week, seen some incredible stuff integrating Pivot, Silverlight, and Sharepoint. Sure it's enterprise and not Web 2.0 social web, but its the type of stuff that makes CIO cough up millions of dollars.
We've looked at Open Office and Google Apps in years past and they were literally at MS Office 2000 level. If all you want to do is write a memo, Word, OpenOffice, GoogleDocs, or Notepad will work fine.
When you're in a real enterprise with real enterprise needs, the features in Office that you think no one uses, are a huge win businesses. And once you're using Office, BizTalk and Sharepoint just bring everything together.
And the other tool that only MS has is Visual Studio. Still hands down the best dev environment I've used.
We should be clear. Windows has never been the only OS choice. IMO it has always been Office that has been the key to MS dominance. And while pundits, who generally aren't in the enterprise, think that world can move away from Office. I think just the opposite. The new features, that aren't of general use to Joe Schmoe, make it more invaluable for the enterprise.