Which of the two probably depends on the particular situation, as it often is in technology.
Supposedly there was a time period where the Android team was considering .NET/C# instead of Java. In the short term their choice of Java was best for them but in the long run it led to things like the Oracle lawsuit and its threat of changing copyright law forever in a bad way - so it's interesting to consider what an alternate timeline would look like.
IE6 was amazing at the time compared to its competitors, but then it quickly became a hindrance - a good example of how the situation can flip the moment the ecosystem changes.
Don't do stats with excel. It's all wrong, Microsoft won't fix the bugs.
They really kind of earned their reputation in an honest and direct fashion. Aversion to Microsoft works great, doesn't it? Need a spreadsheet? Use gnumeric. Calculation errors are bugs and those bugs get fixed.
Both of which are a bit out of date so some things may have been fixed.
It's generally not a great platform for numeric work, but some things can be improved if you know the issues. For examples the last time I checked (a while ago) things like sum/std/mean would not do anything intelligent with large columns/rows leading to accumulation errors if you did it naively, but you can work around stuff like that if you know it is there... but you will end up re implementing which makes it painful
I know of some numerical instability and a faulty or inefficient implementation of the normal distribution formulas (NORM.INV, I believe). Was a while back when I ran into this, so can't give more details.
That being said, basic financial modelling in Excel is killer.
No doubt they have some of the best software out there (not all of it, mind you) - Excel is a marvel. I think where a lot of us get wary is _how_ Microsoft sells their software. They're more than happy to charge you money every year whether the software gets major updates that year or not - and whether you, as a user, need any new features or not.
Helping Humanity™ doesn't change the fact that too much power/marketshare centralized in any industry is bad for competition/furthering tech in that industry.
Cloudflare and Gmail have become great products - but at what cost?
Sounds of the stuff they do is incredible, just not talked about.