There are two reasons to go public, for one to make as much profit as and otherwise to get more funding than they can get through normal means to then make as much profit as possible.

The main issue with Excel is that it is not multithreading in all operations. But for a lot of things it is the only software that can fit the bill.

Libre office feels a lot worse in to work in up to 8 hours a day compared to Excel and it is probably still missing some features like powerquery among others. I do need to test it again, it has been a while.

Then again I work as accountant so I am probably in minority of Excel users.

Yeah you are totally right, we shouldn’t think of corporations as friends.

There is however a difference and that is that Valve is a private company while others like Amazon are publicly traded and therefore even more profit-orientated. As long as Valve makes enough profit to be able to cope with a couple bad years it is doing alright.