Of course there are alternatives to Excel. Anyone pretending otherwise has only worked at a few places and is generalizing with great but mistaken confidence.
But even if there weren’t, think about those companies living on the edge of one software breakdown. There’s a word for that: brittle. Meh, YOLO.
When I’m shopping for cell phones and reading reviews a routinely see comments about the amount of bloatware embedded on various manufacturer’s devices. People actually do care about it, reviewers actually do write about it.
Doesn’t that depend on the forums, though? For many organizations, those sites fit the needs perfectly fine. If you don’t care about archiving and you would not be totally screwed if the forum disappeared tomorrow, you’re going to opt for something simple like that.
God bless DCVS.
I’ve never had compatibility issues. Of course many people have, but a lot of the time people are blindly speculating about potential badness.