It's a very effective form of distributed / peer to peer lock in. Even if you individually (yourself or your company) would be willing to move to some decent a

It's a very effective form of distributed / peer to peer lock in. Even if you individually (yourself or your company) would be willing to move to some decent alternative (they do exist), you will still be exchanging files with people who are more locked in than you (e.g. banks/finance), because of custom plug-ins, custom macros, etc. If I wanted to compete with Excel I would start with a plugin / add-in or complement tool and work my way from there. Some companies are probably doing it. They're not really replacing Excel itself but capturing some of the value away from Microsoft.