I wouldn't expect such a tool to come from Microsoft, could be fertile ground for a startup maybe? The hard part is of course gaining the acceptance of existing excel users which is why I would make it look not too dissimilar from excel.
The complicated technical part is making something that enforces strong schemas and good support for concurrent users without feeling complicated or overly constrained.
It doesn't necessarily have to do everything that excel does, just be good for use cases like "make a customer list that everyone from the CEO to the new temp can use at once"
Unfortunately, computer geeks like us are far more interested in making interesting features than making things discoverable and accessible. It's hard enough to get an OSS dev to make a GUI, let alone a good one.
I think the most prescient point so far has been that Excel quickly gives you a sanity check of you data, because it gives you the full view of days right away. Working on an ERP rewrite right now, this has been our continual issue, making all of the data visible, in ways that the old system never did.
The complicated technical part is making something that enforces strong schemas and good support for concurrent users without feeling complicated or overly constrained.
It doesn't necessarily have to do everything that excel does, just be good for use cases like "make a customer list that everyone from the CEO to the new temp can use at once"