Okay, but you have identified exactly the problem with most of the online courses. Since they don't offer anything for completion -- most don't even offer much in the way of a "certification of completion" yet, much less actual credits -- they will continue to get lots of students who AREN'T really motivated to study. They're just taking the course for shits and giggles.
When people put in the work, they want to get something tangible out of it: college credits, or at lease some kind of official piece of paper saying they completed a difficult course that should help them in their careers.
In other words, the incentive isn't there. Put the incentive back in, and they will start keeping students.
That's a great rant, but if you RTFA you'll notice that while the lede mentions Stanford's success in enrolling a large number of students in a non-credit MOOC, the rest of the article (which is the basis for the first paragraph dismissing the significance of Stanford's MOOC numbers) isn't about non-credit MOOCs, it, including the problems identified with high drop-out rates, etc., is about studies of traditional, for-college-credit, online college courses. For which the incentive you are talking about is present, and yet they are not keeping students.
No, they aren't. Laws are actions. Some laws may be motivated by models of expected consequences (and some of those on models that are untested prior to the adoption of the law, though in some cases the model will have been tested, either in formal investigation or by similar laws elsewhere); but some laws a motivated by a priori notions of what should be permitted or not that are independent of consequences. (Whether or not laws should be adopted in this way is beside the point when discussing what laws are.)
Except, a corporations sole source of wealth is not its stockholders.
A governments sole source of revenue isn't its residents either (for most governments, the primary source of revenue is taxpayers, but that's rarely the only source, and the entities that pay tax and the individuals that reside in the country aren't the same sets, though they overlap), but even that's not the point. The point is explicitly stated: a government isn't a pass-through entity whose debts are attributable to any other group (whether "citizens", "residents", "taxpayers", or "revenue contributors", none of which are equivalent groups.) A government's debts are the government's debts, full stop.
The ONLY way the federal government can get money is from its citizens.
Wrong. The federal government, even now, collects revenue (tax revenue, even) from non-citizens every day.
They are the ones that will have to pay that debt off, where-as shareholders in a corporation have nothing to do with it's dept or profits.
Well, since they have a legal claim on the assets of the corporation in the event of dissolution, and collectively have the power to force dissolution to collect those assets if they don't like what management is doing and don't feel like replacing the management, they certainly have something to do with its profits (though, in practice, if they don't like what management is doing they'll replace the management.) Since they are generally immune to claims for its debts outside of exceptional circumstances, you are mostly right when it comes to debts.
A corporation can use borrowed money to generate more money.
So can a government.
When the government borrows money, its to cover expenses that they couldn't pay for with tax revenues. There's no way to turn that borrowed money into more money.
Wrong. The government can get money in ways exactly equivalent to some of the ways a corporation can (e.g., by spending money to directly to improve the returns of its own revenue-generating activities, or by purchasing assets and reselling them later for a profit), and in other ways that analogous to ways that a corporation can though strictly different (e.g., any spending that improves the overall economy increases the pool from which the government raises taxes, and can increase revenue in the long-run; this is loosely analogous to corporate ability to invest in various activities that either make it more attractive to consumers or which grow the market for its industry in general, though generally only loosely analogous.)
Some do, some don't. IIRC, plenty of growing businesses have debt that is mostly-increasing (if not quite perfectly monotically increasing) over time, but its constrained because the long-term rate of growth of the business exceeds the long-term rate of growth of the debt.
The Feds, on the other hand, do deficit spending every year, regular as clockwork, with no intention of ever paying off the debt.
No, its not regular as clockwork. Both the sign and, even moreso, the magnitude (either absolute or relative to GDP) of the net surplus/deficit change; but, even if it was, that wouldn't necessarily bad; you can run a permanent deficit without any adverse effects if, over the long term, you aren't increasing the debt to GDP ratio (even if in the short term, e.g., in and during the recovery from rare events like major recessions or major wars, you are increasing that ratio.)
More important, in terms of fiscal sustainability, than the net surplus/deficit resulting from the aggregate level of taxing and spending is the specific taxing and spending decisions and what effect they have on strength of the economy
Note that deficit spending to accomplish some specific objective (as opposed to "we want to spend more money than tax revenues allow, so we'll borrow some more") wouldn't bother nearly so many people as you might think.
All actual government deficit spending (and, heck, even non-deficit government spending) has a specific and identified objective, so "deficit spending to accomplish a specific objective" would bother exactly as many people as the actual deficit spending that occurs bothers.
The problem with the deficit is that it's a permanent fixture in the budget
Deficits are certainly common, but calling them regular as clockwork or a permanent fixture shows a distinct lack of historical perspective.
That's because the President keeps spending money. You can't spend your way out of debt, it's ludicrous
If it was ludicrous to spend more money in the short term to expand the long-term ability to earn revenue for all purposes, including paying down debt, businesses would never issue bonds (and if they tried to issue them, no one would ever buy them; and even if the businesses issued them and gullible fools bought them, both the issuing businesses and the foolish investors would collapse.)
In the real world, businesses use deficit spending to grow their ability to earn revenue all the time.
If you add up the total debt — state, local, the works — every man, woman, and child in this country owes 200 grand (which is rather more than the average Greek does).
This is both false, and, even if you reform it to deal with the outright false part, misleading.
Its false because governments aren't conventional partnerships, so the government debt isn't individual debt of the current residents. Just as you can't add up the liabilities of a corporation and attribute them as personal liabilities of the stockholders, you can't do the same thing if you swap "government" for "corporation" and "resident" for "stockholder".
That aside, measuring per capita external debt is pretty meaningless. Sure, the external debt per capita is higher in the US than in Greece. So is the rate of wealth production available to pay off the debt (e.g., the GDP). Greece's external debt per GDP, the more important measure, is much higher than that in the US.
I was going to use my mod points to mod up the first person who questioned the new math behind how a $208 million dollar project cancelled halfway through already cost $254 million dollars.
It didn't. $135 million dollars had been spent on it -- the $208 million number is in a different sentence, about a different $371 million project by a different state agency where the contractor was fired.
Also note that "halfway through" doesn't mean that only half the allocated costs were consumed; indeed, costs outpacing progress very frequently one of the signals that lead to a project being cancelled.
Probably not, but few people drink straight alcohol and even fewer are around to discuss why.
Many people, OTOH, drink beverages which happen to contain alcohol for the taste.
Most of the actual works I've seen (which are more reliable than wikipedia) have said that hangovers symptoms have been demonstrated to be linked to several of those factors, but that dehydration is by far the most significant overall (though others may be more significant in particular individuals, depending on individual sensitivities and other conditions.)
This is what I've never understood with capitalism: thanks to limited liability, businessmen make far lower risks than the average worker, who has no protection from responsibility, yet businessmen seem entitled to far greater rewards.
Its perhaps worth noting that "capitalism" is a term created by socialists as a label for a particular economic system, and was chosen specifically because of the fact that the labelled system favored the capital-holding class.
So, its kind of funny to see people being surprised that capitalism favors capital, since the fact that it does that is why it is called "capitalism", rather than "happy equal fairness-ism".
If journalism is now just "a form of entertainment" then as a democracy where people are trying to make decent decisions about their government and what corporations they interact with we're in DEEP SHIT.
This is not really a new problem. "Journalism" has always been dominated by ideologically- and self-interest-motivated propaganda and sensationalism-driven entertainment; the latter is always what sells best, the latter is what the dominant alternative motivation which justifies sacrificing what sells for something else. Sure, if rigourous devotion to quality journalism over greed and ideology (not just among journalists, but also among the owners of news outlets that employ them and set standards for what gets out) was more common and we had more honest journalism, that would be better -- but it is not, and has not ever been, the real world.
That's one of the reasons education -- and particular critical thinking skills -- are crucial in a democracy (or, really, anywhere else). Getting a good picture of what is going on on which to make judgements (political or otherwise) takes hard work to weed out the wheat from the chaff, not just passive consumption of journalism. This has always been true, and been widely recognized for centuries.
Of course version numbers carry meaning. They can't carry lots and lots of meaning, but they can carry a little bit. Why even bother with dotted-decimal version numbers if the dots and decimals mean nothing? Just use integers, but even monotonically increasing integers have "meaning" in that they convey directional advancement of the software.
Monotonically increasing identifiers (or even multiple of them, like, e.g., Chrome has for both the release and the build) whose meaning corresponds to inherently serial events like releases are not problematic.
Version numbers tied to meaning that is not inherent to the idea of sequential version releases but to some objective relating to feature change (as in semver), and which therefore have a non-trivial risk of being incorrect if problems are identified in a pre-general-release version identified with a particular version number that result in a change in the feature set of the general release that the preview is attached to are, on the other hand, problematic (as, in different ways, are those tied to subjective descriptions of feature change, which can change whether or not the objective features change, and in any case are of dubious informational utility since the user's subjective view may differ from the developer's.)
I disagree. I worked in an Agile shop where we followed it pretty closely, and it worked fine for us. Features might get delayed, though releases were regular. I don't understand why you say it's less appropriate. Are you sure we're talking about the same thing?
If you aren't talking about semver, which AFAIK is the only objective standard widely promote for version numbering, we aren't talking about the same thing.
Semver is less appropriate if there is a cost associated with last minute changes to the version number associated with a release: if features aren't set well in advance and can slip, then the things that determine the appropriate semver-based version number also aren't set in advance. Its probably a bigger deal with something like a browser where you have prerelease versions widely distributed to the public with version numbers that expect to carry over to the corresponding general release: if after version 1.0 general release you release version 2.0-dev (2.0 because your implementing a major new feature whose implementation involves backward-compatibility breaking changes), and somewhere before the general release there's bugs that kick that feature out and the actual general release no longer has backward compatible changes, do you break semver and keep the 2.0 designation or break consistency and have a (for instance) 1.1 general release following the 2.0-dev?
Major version numbers are incremented when there are major features added. Minor versions are incremented when fewer or less important features are added, or bug fixes. Build or release numbers are incremented at every build (or release). Why would that "not work"?
It doesn't work all that well for anything, because major and minor are subjective and thus the versioning doesn't communicate actionable information. Semver, which sets objective criteria for major and minor updates -- roughly major = "breaking change to public API", minor = "new functionality that does not break backwards compatibility", patch = "bug fix that neither adds new functionality nor breaks backward compatibility" -- provides useful information, but has the problems I discussed before (as a version numbering system for stable releases of APIs, its excellent, if you ignore the pre-release options.)
But some groups (like Mozilla) insist on jumping the major version for relatively minor reasons, and others seem to get stuck at version 0.5 forever. But that's not because they can't agree on a standard.
Well, in the Mozilla (and Google Chrome, and Ubuntu, and...) case it is emphatically because they don't agree that semver or any similar "standard" is appropriate for that product.
Sure. But I think the whole point here is: a great many of us disagree with them.
As the context shows, that's quite clearly not the "whole point" of what I was responding to in GP.
There is already something of an industry-wide standard for version numbers, and it fits with your definition pretty closely. It's just that many don't follow it. Including outfits like Mozilla, in recent years.
The problem with semver is that it works well enough with upfront and unchanging release feature sets but doesn't work with development methodologies where releases are fixed in time but features are less fixed and whatever isn't ready gets kicked down the line.
But some groups (like Mozilla) insist on jumping the major version for relatively minor reasons, and others seem to get stuck at version 0.5 forever. But that's not because they can't agree on a standard.
Well, in the Mozilla (and Google Chrome, and Ubuntu, and...) case it is emphatically because they don't agree that semver or any similar "standard" is appropriate for that product.
While there is certainly value in continuous as-you-type output rendering of LaTex, remember that the purpose of LaTeX is typesetting, not word processing. The value is that you describe to (La)TeX how you want things to be rendered and rely upon it doing the right thing, which it nearly always does, beautifully.
I think the value of as-you-type rendering is very loosely analogous to that of having automated continuous as-you-type parsing and syntax error highlighting combined with compile/build/test cycles that run on source file saves when programming, in terms of providing rapid feedback that what you are doing is what you mean to do and catching errors while you are mentally "close" to them.
I agree with you completely. And if I had control or even influence to get that kind of headcount, I think it would be a fantastic "force-multiplier" in our organization.
Yeah, I realize that often the problem exists at an organizational level that is itself not responsive to the people who make the decision, leaving line and middle managers (who usually have to deal with this) only bad options.
Do you seriously believe that the location of EACH collection of sales tax is needed, wanted or recorded?
Yes, because when there are multiple taxing districts, where each bit of the funds goes depends on which (potentially several simultaneously) of the (often nested) taxing districts the sale was in. And sellers can be audit to the individual sale for compliance.
Again, it's Google's responsibility as the collector of said tax. Not the supplier of the app.
It would be, if Google was a seller rather than a payment processor. But that's not the case.
Google collects the money. That has to include the taxes.
Google processes the payment. They aren't the seller, and they have no responsibility to collect, or pay, sales taxes. Which is probably one of the reason Google uses that model for Google Checkout (including, but not limited to, sales from Google Play) rather than the retailer model.
What I think many commentators are missing is that Google, as the actual seller of the app, is like a retail outlet.
No, what I think many people (including parent) are missing is that, per the terms of the agreements with both buyers and sellers, Google is -- unlike the operators of some online marketplaces with superficially similar user experience -- not the actual seller of the app, but simply provides a marketplace where buyers can find sellers and digitial delivery and payment processing services to enable transactions between the actual buyer and seller to be completed.
Apple doesn't provide developers with any personal customer information for app purchases. Valve doesn't for Steam purchases. Amazon doesn't for digital software purchases. Microsoft doesn't for app or Xbox purchases.
Unlike those other online markets, Google does not act as the seller in the exchange with the developer as a supplier but as a payment processor with the developer as the seller.
The differences all stem from the difference in relationships.
No, they're still the merchant by technicality (and legality) [wikipedia.org], it's just that they've off-loaded much of the responsibility (and thus, risk) onto the manufacturers of the product they sell.
No, for the products Google sells (which are not the products that merchants other than Google sell through the online promotional and card-processing facility known as the "Google Play Store"), they have the usual responsibilities of a merchant in the exchange. For the products which other merchants sell using Google's facilities, the selling merchant retains the responsibility.
The fact that there are other online facilities that are superficially similar to the Google Play Store but in which the facility operator is, in fact, the seller of all items doesn't change the fact that this is not the relationship that exists in the Google Play Store.
The problem is in most organizations, IT is not responsive to requests to set up these kinds of databases.
Using Excel for tasks to which databases are better suited because you have an unresponsive IT organization results in an additional problem on top of the one you started with, rather than dealing with the original problem.
They especially don't deal with requests that are not precise and require a fast turn-around.
What you probably need in that case is a small number of technical staff "embedded" with the regular business units to handle analysis to make imprecise requests precise when support from the regular IT organization is needed, and to deal with simple rapid-turnaround requests independently.
What you don't need need is people turning to Excel because its the only thing that they have access to because IT is unresponsive, building initially simple things that grow organically to become cumbersome, and then require more IT effort to move into a proper platform then if IT had been involved and appropriately responsive from day one.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a great rant, but if you RTFA you'll notice that while the lede mentions Stanford's success in enrolling a large number of students in a non-credit MOOC, the rest of the article (which is the basis for the first paragraph dismissing the significance of Stanford's MOOC numbers) isn't about non-credit MOOCs, it, including the problems identified with high drop-out rates, etc., is about studies of traditional, for-college-credit, online college courses. For which the incentive you are talking about is present, and yet they are not keeping students.
San Francisco is not an island.
No, they aren't. Laws are actions. Some laws may be motivated by models of expected consequences (and some of those on models that are untested prior to the adoption of the law, though in some cases the model will have been tested, either in formal investigation or by similar laws elsewhere); but some laws a motivated by a priori notions of what should be permitted or not that are independent of consequences. (Whether or not laws should be adopted in this way is beside the point when discussing what laws are.)
Evidence?
A governments sole source of revenue isn't its residents either (for most governments, the primary source of revenue is taxpayers, but that's rarely the only source, and the entities that pay tax and the individuals that reside in the country aren't the same sets, though they overlap), but even that's not the point. The point is explicitly stated: a government isn't a pass-through entity whose debts are attributable to any other group (whether "citizens", "residents", "taxpayers", or "revenue contributors", none of which are equivalent groups.) A government's debts are the government's debts, full stop.
Wrong. The federal government, even now, collects revenue (tax revenue, even) from non-citizens every day.
Well, since they have a legal claim on the assets of the corporation in the event of dissolution, and collectively have the power to force dissolution to collect those assets if they don't like what management is doing and don't feel like replacing the management, they certainly have something to do with its profits (though, in practice, if they don't like what management is doing they'll replace the management.) Since they are generally immune to claims for its debts outside of exceptional circumstances, you are mostly right when it comes to debts.
So can a government.
Wrong. The government can get money in ways exactly equivalent to some of the ways a corporation can (e.g., by spending money to directly to improve the returns of its own revenue-generating activities, or by purchasing assets and reselling them later for a profit), and in other ways that analogous to ways that a corporation can though strictly different (e.g., any spending that improves the overall economy increases the pool from which the government raises taxes, and can increase revenue in the long-run; this is loosely analogous to corporate ability to invest in various activities that either make it more attractive to consumers or which grow the market for its industry in general, though generally only loosely analogous.)
Some do, some don't. IIRC, plenty of growing businesses have debt that is mostly-increasing (if not quite perfectly monotically increasing) over time, but its constrained because the long-term rate of growth of the business exceeds the long-term rate of growth of the debt.
No, its not regular as clockwork. Both the sign and, even moreso, the magnitude (either absolute or relative to GDP) of the net surplus/deficit change; but, even if it was, that wouldn't necessarily bad; you can run a permanent deficit without any adverse effects if, over the long term, you aren't increasing the debt to GDP ratio (even if in the short term, e.g., in and during the recovery from rare events like major recessions or major wars, you are increasing that ratio.)
More important, in terms of fiscal sustainability, than the net surplus/deficit resulting from the aggregate level of taxing and spending is the specific taxing and spending decisions and what effect they have on strength of the economy
All actual government deficit spending (and, heck, even non-deficit government spending) has a specific and identified objective, so "deficit spending to accomplish a specific objective" would bother exactly as many people as the actual deficit spending that occurs bothers.
Deficits are certainly common, but calling them regular as clockwork or a permanent fixture shows a distinct lack of historical perspective.
If it was ludicrous to spend more money in the short term to expand the long-term ability to earn revenue for all purposes, including paying down debt, businesses would never issue bonds (and if they tried to issue them, no one would ever buy them; and even if the businesses issued them and gullible fools bought them, both the issuing businesses and the foolish investors would collapse.)
In the real world, businesses use deficit spending to grow their ability to earn revenue all the time.
This is both false, and, even if you reform it to deal with the outright false part, misleading. Its false because governments aren't conventional partnerships, so the government debt isn't individual debt of the current residents. Just as you can't add up the liabilities of a corporation and attribute them as personal liabilities of the stockholders, you can't do the same thing if you swap "government" for "corporation" and "resident" for "stockholder". That aside, measuring per capita external debt is pretty meaningless. Sure, the external debt per capita is higher in the US than in Greece. So is the rate of wealth production available to pay off the debt (e.g., the GDP). Greece's external debt per GDP, the more important measure, is much higher than that in the US.
It didn't. $135 million dollars had been spent on it -- the $208 million number is in a different sentence, about a different $371 million project by a different state agency where the contractor was fired. Also note that "halfway through" doesn't mean that only half the allocated costs were consumed; indeed, costs outpacing progress very frequently one of the signals that lead to a project being cancelled.
Probably not, but few people drink straight alcohol and even fewer are around to discuss why. Many people, OTOH, drink beverages which happen to contain alcohol for the taste.
Most of the actual works I've seen (which are more reliable than wikipedia) have said that hangovers symptoms have been demonstrated to be linked to several of those factors, but that dehydration is by far the most significant overall (though others may be more significant in particular individuals, depending on individual sensitivities and other conditions.)
Its perhaps worth noting that "capitalism" is a term created by socialists as a label for a particular economic system, and was chosen specifically because of the fact that the labelled system favored the capital-holding class.
So, its kind of funny to see people being surprised that capitalism favors capital, since the fact that it does that is why it is called "capitalism", rather than "happy equal fairness-ism".
This is not really a new problem. "Journalism" has always been dominated by ideologically- and self-interest-motivated propaganda and sensationalism-driven entertainment; the latter is always what sells best, the latter is what the dominant alternative motivation which justifies sacrificing what sells for something else. Sure, if rigourous devotion to quality journalism over greed and ideology (not just among journalists, but also among the owners of news outlets that employ them and set standards for what gets out) was more common and we had more honest journalism, that would be better -- but it is not, and has not ever been, the real world.
That's one of the reasons education -- and particular critical thinking skills -- are crucial in a democracy (or, really, anywhere else). Getting a good picture of what is going on on which to make judgements (political or otherwise) takes hard work to weed out the wheat from the chaff, not just passive consumption of journalism. This has always been true, and been widely recognized for centuries.
Monotonically increasing identifiers (or even multiple of them, like, e.g., Chrome has for both the release and the build) whose meaning corresponds to inherently serial events like releases are not problematic. Version numbers tied to meaning that is not inherent to the idea of sequential version releases but to some objective relating to feature change (as in semver), and which therefore have a non-trivial risk of being incorrect if problems are identified in a pre-general-release version identified with a particular version number that result in a change in the feature set of the general release that the preview is attached to are, on the other hand, problematic (as, in different ways, are those tied to subjective descriptions of feature change, which can change whether or not the objective features change, and in any case are of dubious informational utility since the user's subjective view may differ from the developer's.)
If you aren't talking about semver, which AFAIK is the only objective standard widely promote for version numbering, we aren't talking about the same thing. Semver is less appropriate if there is a cost associated with last minute changes to the version number associated with a release: if features aren't set well in advance and can slip, then the things that determine the appropriate semver-based version number also aren't set in advance. Its probably a bigger deal with something like a browser where you have prerelease versions widely distributed to the public with version numbers that expect to carry over to the corresponding general release: if after version 1.0 general release you release version 2.0-dev (2.0 because your implementing a major new feature whose implementation involves backward-compatibility breaking changes), and somewhere before the general release there's bugs that kick that feature out and the actual general release no longer has backward compatible changes, do you break semver and keep the 2.0 designation or break consistency and have a (for instance) 1.1 general release following the 2.0-dev?
It doesn't work all that well for anything, because major and minor are subjective and thus the versioning doesn't communicate actionable information. Semver, which sets objective criteria for major and minor updates -- roughly major = "breaking change to public API", minor = "new functionality that does not break backwards compatibility", patch = "bug fix that neither adds new functionality nor breaks backward compatibility" -- provides useful information, but has the problems I discussed before (as a version numbering system for stable releases of APIs, its excellent, if you ignore the pre-release options.)
As the context shows, that's quite clearly not the "whole point" of what I was responding to in GP.
The problem with semver is that it works well enough with upfront and unchanging release feature sets but doesn't work with development methodologies where releases are fixed in time but features are less fixed and whatever isn't ready gets kicked down the line.
Well, in the Mozilla (and Google Chrome, and Ubuntu, and...) case it is emphatically because they don't agree that semver or any similar "standard" is appropriate for that product.
I think the value of as-you-type rendering is very loosely analogous to that of having automated continuous as-you-type parsing and syntax error highlighting combined with compile/build/test cycles that run on source file saves when programming, in terms of providing rapid feedback that what you are doing is what you mean to do and catching errors while you are mentally "close" to them.
Yeah, I realize that often the problem exists at an organizational level that is itself not responsive to the people who make the decision, leaving line and middle managers (who usually have to deal with this) only bad options.
Yes, because when there are multiple taxing districts, where each bit of the funds goes depends on which (potentially several simultaneously) of the (often nested) taxing districts the sale was in. And sellers can be audit to the individual sale for compliance.
It would be, if Google was a seller rather than a payment processor. But that's not the case.
Google processes the payment. They aren't the seller, and they have no responsibility to collect, or pay, sales taxes. Which is probably one of the reason Google uses that model for Google Checkout (including, but not limited to, sales from Google Play) rather than the retailer model.
No, what I think many people (including parent) are missing is that, per the terms of the agreements with both buyers and sellers, Google is -- unlike the operators of some online marketplaces with superficially similar user experience -- not the actual seller of the app, but simply provides a marketplace where buyers can find sellers and digitial delivery and payment processing services to enable transactions between the actual buyer and seller to be completed.
Unlike those other online markets, Google does not act as the seller in the exchange with the developer as a supplier but as a payment processor with the developer as the seller.
The differences all stem from the difference in relationships.
No, for the products Google sells (which are not the products that merchants other than Google sell through the online promotional and card-processing facility known as the "Google Play Store"), they have the usual responsibilities of a merchant in the exchange. For the products which other merchants sell using Google's facilities, the selling merchant retains the responsibility.
The fact that there are other online facilities that are superficially similar to the Google Play Store but in which the facility operator is, in fact, the seller of all items doesn't change the fact that this is not the relationship that exists in the Google Play Store.
Using Excel for tasks to which databases are better suited because you have an unresponsive IT organization results in an additional problem on top of the one you started with, rather than dealing with the original problem.
What you probably need in that case is a small number of technical staff "embedded" with the regular business units to handle analysis to make imprecise requests precise when support from the regular IT organization is needed, and to deal with simple rapid-turnaround requests independently. What you don't need need is people turning to Excel because its the only thing that they have access to because IT is unresponsive, building initially simple things that grow organically to become cumbersome, and then require more IT effort to move into a proper platform then if IT had been involved and appropriately responsive from day one.
That one claims to integrate with, not emulate, Google Docs.