I was talking about Apache Spark via Databricks. ~220 of the people that were attached to Excel and PowerBI switched over for their calculations and data processing, 3 remained. One was let go, one didn't actually use Excel to write data, only to see it and search it, and the third wasn't able to learn the replacement so they got to keep Excel.
It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web.
It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.
It's not a cruel trick and even if it was: web-based spreadsheets might not have the same functionality, but the people that were using the desktop-based spreadsheets weren't doing much more than basic computation on fields and search/replace. That works fine on the web.
It's not like we took away their toys and gave them dirt instead. We just made everyone take the startup course to get them acquainted and if that went well we would decide our next steps. It went well, and the next steps became removing Excel from the standard workflows.