I don’t think it’s incompetence, exactly. If you’re not going to pay for Photoshop (Lightroom, Audition, etc…), Adobe would rather you use a pirated Photoshop as opposed to learning something else. Because even a pirated version helps them keep their stranglehold on the market.
It’s the same reason Microsoft doesn’t really crack down on pirated versions of Windows.
Excel is a spreadsheet, and spreadsheets like Excel are first and foremost aimed at accounting sort of tasks. Whether they actually need Excel versus something like Google Docs or Libreoffice is another thing. The big thing with Excel is that it gets used (and abused) to do things that it’s not really intended for doing such as those spreadsheets that are full of macros trying to be an application, or those spreadsheets that are trying to be a database, and so forth.
From an engineering perspective, I find Excel to be annoying because it’s clearly first and foremost an accounting tool, and some of its behaviors like the way it rounds numbers and tries to turn everything into a date is downright obnoxious. I still use it from time to time for quick and dirty things like whipping up a couple of plots quickly (and this doesn’t really need Excel… but at work all the computers have Excel), but otherwise for anything more complicated I’d probably switch to something else.
Most of those apps could be replaced by a website that will work anywhere. But a website can’t spy on you as easily… so they push apps instead.
The other problem with moving manufacturing due to tariffs is that tariffs can always be changed, whereas moving manufacturing is a longer term investment that can cost millions, if not billions when it comes to things like chip fabs. No one wants to make an investment like that, only to have their investment suddenly become worthless because some politician decided to change how the tariffs work.
Trump’s idiotic and constant flip-flopping on these tariffs have completely destroyed any chance of them actually accomplishing anything (not that they really had a great chance of that in the first place, but anyway…), because no one is going to move a factory to the US when Trump can and will change his mind based upon a whim or whoever is whispering in his ear that moment.