There is one important network effect they seem to be neglecting - the "big ball of mud" network effect of having hundreds of Excel spreadsheets all linked into

There is one important network effect they seem to be neglecting - the "big ball of mud" network effect of having hundreds of Excel spreadsheets all linked into each other, forming critical parts of the finance infrastructure of megacorps. This kind of end-user-computing nightmare is so hard to migrate away from that most companies can't even conceive how to do it. However, regulatory schemes like SOX in the USA and Solvency II and Basel III in Europe, are forcing the issue. Big banks and insurers won't be allowed to carry on running critical finance operations on such a fragile stack, so there are currently huge migrations away from Excel happening all across the financial services industry. Software like SAS and Business Objects seem to be the anti-Excels of choice. There will obviously still be Excel on the desktop, used for ad-hoc data manipulation and visualization, which is what it is actually good for, but this type of usage is much easier to replace with something like OpenOffice.