turboSnail

Same with industrial automation, power grid, production management, etc. Most people don’t even realise how much critical software is Windows-only.

Likewise, climate change isn’t really a technological problem. Governments don’t motivate companies stop destroying the planet, so they don’t. Obviously, there are some technological issues too, but for the most part, it’s a political issue.

If there’s a way around the legislation, they’ll definitely take it. If you know of an exploit in the system or if you’re best buddies with the local king, laws suddenly cease to matter.

Very interesting… I guess my calculations can be supercharged while still technically remaining in the realm of a spreadsheet.

Hopefully Python still runs with its usual consistency. VBA is a total nightmare in this regard. The code can randomly throw some useless error for no obvious reason. You can run the same code a few hours later and everything works perfectly even though you didn’t change anything. Can’t really use anything that unstable for anything serious.

Yep. Money steers the decision making process. Politics determines how money works, and companies just go with the flow.

I totally agree with you. Politics is the correct arena for this.

Those who work at the IT department of a company have some authority in this matter too, and they can convince the executives to channel the resources for the migration. If you’re in any other part of the organization tree, your words have less weight.

If laws are written first, and companies react after that, it’s not going to be a very smooth landing, but I still think this is the most likely outcome. Ideally, smart IT people in various companies would bring this up as a potential risk to daily operations. This way, companies would have more time to react before the laws are enforced.

My guess is, most executives won’t give any money to a migration project of this magnitude unless the future of the company depends on it. There needs to be some sort of impending doom in the horizon, before they start reacting. Maybe massive fines or a total collapse of the IT infrastructure would do it.

Can confirm! Calc is fine as long as you’re not trying to do anything too advanced. Then again, when you bump into those limits, you might want to consider switching to R or Python anyway. Excel just allows you to delay that inevitability a little bit longer.

Now there’s a business opportunity. When companies are that screwed, they’ll start the project immediately. That’s when system migration consults get rich.

I think many companies are basically stuck with Microsoft (Excel, Word, Teams, Sharepoint, Onedrive etc). Switching to something else is going to be a pretty serious project. It’s going to be expensive and time consuming.

Totally worth doing IMO, but convincing the CEO is another matter. I guess we need a cautionary tale before the executives decide to reserve a few million euros for rebuilding a significant part of the IT infrastructure.

The company is private, but your data isn’t.