First, I don't think they'll be able to. I have had the displeasure of using their web Outlook client and it was absurdly buggy for a software company of the stature of Microsoft. I can only imagine how terrible the web version of a complex software like Excel will be. Not to mention the poor performance. There's no way they will lose all of their finance customers like that... but, it's Microsoft, so... who knows.
Second, Office hasn't really looked like Windows for like... the past 20 years.
> I can only imagine how terrible the web version of a complex software like Excel will be.
It's actually not that terrible, but I believe it's nowhere near feature parity. Not to mention there is a galaxy of add-ons that still need to be rewritten from scratch to work on the web version, and a lot of people cannot live without them.
Excel is a classic case of 80% of users requiring 20% of all functionality, but that 20% being different for each user. Still, Microsoft made it very clear that the future is web-first.
For my part, LibreOffice Calc does all of what I want Excel to do, although not quite as smoothly. But I'm much happier donating to them than paying Microsoft.
If you don't have feature parity, you really are in trouble, because then you are competing with Google Sheets, on which actually competent engineers are working.
It's not the competence of the individuals that makes the difference. Microsoft is also full of Very Smart People. Organizational structure and ego management strategies drive the engineering choices that lead to bad software.
Sorry, but imo Office/Microsoft 365 passed Google's options a while ago and have only gotten farther ahead. Either work for my needs, and I'm shifting to self-hosted OnlyOffice, but MS is definitely ahead on this one.
Microsoft Outlook is already a web app at its core: "The point here being that Mail and Calendar are native Windows applications, whereas the new Outlook for Windows is essentially a web app at its core, from what we can tell."
Native is dead as it seems, at least for he Microsoft Office Team.
Someone correct me if wrong but "outlook for windows" is not the same as "office outlook". The first one seems like it was created to fill the hole of outlook express and the mail app that came out later. i.e. the free email application that windows ships with.
> The latter is actually pretty good - been using it for a couple of months
You must be using a different New Outlook than me. I've been conscripted into trying it before the mass rollout to the rest of my company. It's so slow and missing so many features from the Old Outlook that it's only really usable for the most basic tasks.
Users can't run macros or create macros in the office webapps. Seems like a major step backwards in usability.
> Although you can't create, run, or edit VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) macros in Excel for the web, you can open and edit a workbook that contains macros. Any existing macros will remain in the workbook, and you can open the workbook in the Excel desktop app to view and edit the macros.
IIRC, there's work on a JS/TS capable macro API that can be used in the future. I will say, the effort MS has made to feature parity for Office's web interfaces is pretty impressive. I also say this as I've been planning to move my personal usage completely to self-host options (NextCloud, OnlyOffice, etc).
Second, Office hasn't really looked like Windows for like... the past 20 years.