Oh boy you don’t know what our culture looks like. It’s more “it’s cool that people are building on top of it and we want to figure out how we can make it easier”
Oh Microsoft the company is not to be trusted and is not your friend. It’s a huge company with many employees and products. Moreover I can’t attest to any other group’s culture - I can only say what we do in Excel.
In Excel working hard to make addons possible and trying to foster an ecosystem of users sharing expertise is a focus as well as community building and smbs.
Taking a cool community project and doing it ourselves would shooting our selves in the foot.
More than once I didn’t do things or work in features for that reason.
Again not because Microsoft is your friend but because it’s in our business interest.
I don’t speak for Microsoft or Excel and am just a developer/hacker ;)
I always got the feeling that because it's such a key product the Excel team was basically its own organisation within the wider corporation and as a result had a lot more freedom to make its own choices.
(not that I'm arguing for trust that would, as you say, be misplaced, but if my feeling is correct then the Excel org's englightened self interest can diverge from the mothership's self interest more than other divisions can, which makes the calculations as to what your management is likely to decide notably different)
I got this impression as well. I worked on a team two years back building out a very complex Excel plugin using Excel.js. The SDK has quite a few quirks and we ran into some problems along the way, but the team at Microsoft responsible for it was happy to help and interested in hearing feedback and features we wanted. A positive experience :)
A little off topic but will Typescript support ever come to desktop Excel or is it just going to remain on the web version? Office Scripts are great but bit of a bummer I can only write them for web.
