When people spend a lot of time working with a variety of different businesses, they are initially surprised by how much of the world runs on Excel spreadsheets. Most knowledge workers use spreadsheets as a poor man's database.
We use Excel because it's available, familiar and relatively easy to use. BUT a spreadsheet application is a commodity and a vast majority of use cases will work just fine with any modern spreadsheet application like Google Sheets, Apple's Numbers, or Zoho Spreadsheets.
The average company is supporting 5 operating systems. Excel is neither available or easy to use on most of these operating systems. Microsoft should be going crazy pushing Excel as a web-first application but that's not going to happen anytime soon.
What about Outlook? I think it's the Blackberry of enterprise software. Just a few years ago Blackberry devices were everywhere. Today, they're relatively hard to find compared to iOS and Android devices. Mobile device market share is controlled by the fast paced consumer marketplace, the business marketplace moves much slower but it moves all the same. Why do we need client software for something as basic as work email, while we're sharing anything and everything the rest of the time with nothing more than a web browser? We don't.
Outlook is familiar and at one time offered a good value. That time has long since past and in today's world of cloud, mobile and social; Outlook is just clutter.
Outlook and Excel aren't killer apps. They're not even needed apps and people are quickly figuring that out. In today's world Microsoft Office doesn't really matter.
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