Companies also have to pay for Microsoft Excel. Does it mean they don’t own their businesses?

Say MS decided to lock down your access to Excel and all your business is nicely tucked away in those beautifully handcrafted sheets.

It's not a binary thing and we can argue semantics, but MS is definitely holding some keys here.

not quite an apples to apples comparison when your document can be open and read by other spreadsheet applications. You cant take a unity game and run it on unreal.

Not if you're making use of VBA.