Microsoft Office 365 beats out Google’s G Suite in S&P 1500 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office 365 beats out Google’s G Suite in S&P 1500

tech.winton.com

153 pointsah-143 comments

Of course it does. We (@ work) use G Suite and it's good if you use it for simple things, but it's really a toy. People who work a _lot_ with long-ish documents all know that Word is better (because of richer functionality); and people who work with larger spreadsheets know that Excel is better (functionality and performance).

It's the typical situation: no user uses more than 5% of Excel's functionality -- but users don't use the same 5%.

Where G Suite is great is 3rd party integrations, especially ones targeting small/mid size companies.

The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

O365 took the idea and ran. Yes, their web-based UI isn't as rich, but it has some decent collaboration, really good mobile apps and of course excellent desktop native apps.

Google could have held their lead IMHO if they kept building out their Docs/Sheets to be closer to feature-parity with Word/Excel and started earlier on good mobile and desktop native apps (which don't even exist!)

I love me some google docs for collaborative editing, but your right in the scaling of large docs in Word and Excel functionality.

Google docs has to become office in terms of feature parity faster than office online has to match google docs because the microsoft price point is comparable to the standalone. Microsoft can always push people to use the native word and excel apps for certain features because it's covered in the cost of the 365 sub, but google can't do the same because it's a separate cost.

Yea, I agree.

I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company.

Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another.

Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.

> Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

With SharePoint I can share documents and directories with other people in my company.

As much as I think SharePoint is "mediocre", Google Doc is just shit when it comes to sharing[1].

[1] The only sharing google doc does well is sending a link to ONE SINGLE DOCUMENT to a bunch of people by EMAIL ONLY.

With Google Drive I can ALSO share documents and directories with other people in my company. I don't get your point

Yea, that probably wasn't a great example. I think at a basic file storage and sharing perspective the products offer about the same.

However, IMO comparing SharePoint to Google Drive is apples and oranges (and really OneDrive consumer is the appropriate comparison) SharePoint uses metadata and a content type model to organize everything, which is indexed so it can be searched on and have custom filters, views, and forms built off of it. It's a double edged sword though in that as much as it helps organize lots of documents, it also has a lot of maintenance overhead (and a lot of special nuances that people need to learn). It also supports a lot of features that are aimed at implementing simple business processes like workflows, versioning, and document templates.

More recent updates have been trying to gloss over a lot of the complexity and simplify the UI, to make it look more like a consumer level product I guess.

What's wrong with their sharing? I don't understand your comment in [1]

Totally agree. With GDrive you can share a folder with a group of collaborators and anyone can modify or add to the files therein.

With a sharepoint, there is a single place where everything is stored, the sharepoint.

Everything there is accessible, visible and searchable (modulo access permissions). It's de-facto shared.

---

With a Google Drive, all contents is private, only visible by you, only accessible by yourself.

Other people can't access your stuff, people can't search your stuff, people can't even know what may or may not exist.

If you want to share something, you have to email a link a single specific document of yours to selected people (who will each individually have to accept the invite).

How do you keep track of what is shared? by who? to who? how do you share stuff to groups/teams/businessunit? Basically, google docs intuitively goes against everything you want to do in an entreprisey context.

You can share folders; also, check out Team Drive. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/21/google-opens-up-its-new-pr...

It's an early access feature, only available since a few days, if you request it personally to a google sales rep.

Yes. That's one of the thing they miss really bad for sharing. It should have been there for 10 years already.

It's easy to share a folder in Google Drive.

Everything you say also goes for Drive... Not sure what you mean?

There's also some new team drive coming to address this https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2016/11/google-team-dri...

Case in point. Google Drive should have had a workflow for teams and organisations since 10 years.

the new client syncs sharepoint document libraries fine. the only reoccuring problem i have right now is with excel files locking (for 10m??) after editing.

https://blogs.office.com/2016/09/26/sharepoint-online-sync-p...

I use sharepoint as a windows shared network folder. Don't have to use sync tools.

zeedrive?

the new onedrive client with selective sync is nice if you have something like say a 400mb autocad drawing youd rather not stream everytime you double click it. you can sync just the files in the group/documentlibrary you want.

SharePoint has been crap in the past, I'd agree with that, and Outlook is poor when it comes to HTML standards, but the rest of O365 seems solid to me. Other than SharePoint, what in particular do you see as weaknesses in the O365 lineup?

Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?

Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services.

Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)

it says at the bottom if you want to avoid the decision tree to rename your personal account. pick a second username and the problem goes away.

They seem to be parallel services, like Lync and Skype. I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??

Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have their precious Outlook

Outlook for Android is better than any of the alternative mail clients I can get on my phone. Although that is not saying much...

OWA works just fine on Chrome on Linux, I use it every day.

Sharepoint sucks, but then again the whole wiki/CMS/whatever category of things that Sharepoint is a representative of is almost without exception a huge festering cesspool of villainy and suck.

I just uninstalled Outlook for Android and my phone went from unusably-laggy to performing just like new. I had a full charge this morning and it is early afternoon and my battery was at 30%. Android's battery usage analyzer blamed 60% of that on Outlook. Opening Outlook and trying to use it meant 30+ seconds waits while I do simple things like "view the first page of my inbox" or "enter an email address into the To:" field.

You're saying that all the other options are worse??

(As for OWA, I regularly encounter full-page reloads for simple actions, am frequently logged out after my first click on anything, and it is almost obnoxiously slow for the speed of internet that we have. And this is Office365... previous versions of OWA were pretty good though)

> "like Lync and Skype"

Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of user experience to the standard Skype app.

> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"

You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.

Uh, the Mac client still says Lync, and it looks way different than Skype.

"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!

If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have that now can we....

Then you haven't upgraded: https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...

Not unusual. Many orgs are still lagging on Win10 as well. They have contracts with things like cough anti-virus providers of ill repute cough and they cannot upgrade because these tools don't work.

We're rather fond of Windows 7, because it pretty much just works. (And nobody wants to deal with upgrading) A few of the handful of Win10 laptops have been headaches.

"Lagging" is an interesting choice of words...

Funny you say that. Know what I'm doing right now?

Re-encoding MP4s to a slight variant of MP4 so that my demos are visible to Win7 installs. Because they flip out. Known issue, I'm told, but not fixable. Win7 is frozen!

You may not like Win10, but I think Win7 is a ghastly experience that is about as fun as bamboo shoots under one's nails (for developers). It has 0 affordances for modern software development EXCEPT misapplications of the Windows UI. Oh, also before I forget: old Win7 font rendering is substantially uglier than new Win10 font rendering! Critical stuff!

If "just works for email" is your criterion, it's a mistake not to use Chromebooks in the first place.

Well, it's not like you can expect Win7 to just doesn't magically support new file formats? Video is complicated and finicky, you'd be doing bullshit tasks like that for one reason or another

I agree with you that people should upgrade to Windows 10 as soon as they can. But I'm curious about what you mean by misapplications of the Windows UI.

I feel your pain. As a tiny business we are still using old and obsolete WSS 2.0 on a Windows 2003 server. We looked into hosted sharepoint last year but the thing is so slow and cumbersome, it drained all happiness from my life. You can smell all the cludgy enterprise features that have been baked it over the years. Not at all fun for a small business that wants something simple that just works. We are dead set to migrate away to another system, something like GlassCube or Asana. The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting.

>"The one feature we like in WSS that haven't had luck finding elsewhere, is online datasheet reporting where you can define columns, views, and sorting."

Do you mean something like Tableau/QlikView/Pentaho/PowerBI?

http://www.tableau.com/

http://www.qlik.com/us/products/qlikview

http://community.pentaho.com/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Those looks much more in-depth than we are looking for. Sharepoint datasheets lets you create, manage, and view datasets completely inside sharepoint. An end user, for instance, could create dataset of (for instance) company inventory. They can add custom columns with datatype, like inventory count, cost, status, condition, date purchased, etc. They can then create views to filter/sort/group data and display this in different places in a workspace. Data is entered and manage in sharepoint. Has lots of handy uses and you could train non-technical users with it. Replaced lots of excel spreadsheets.

Does a tool like Power BI Desktop not meet your needs? This video gives a quick overview of putting together a report and publishing it to a PowerBI reporting portal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qgam9M8I0xA

I will check it out. Thanks for the link.

> "Like hell I'm not blaming them."

So Microsoft tell the employees at your company which places to store their documents do they? Why does your company not standardise on how documents are stored?

>"It's not my fault that Microsoft can't write decent AJAX"

Examples?

Skype for Business and Skype are two completely different, just barely compatible things. They run completely different networking protocols, and the S4B client is still, barring some cosmetic skinning, the same as the Lync client from nearly four years ago. The About page in the S4B client may still be calling itself the Microsoft Lync Client - it was still doing so in the 2016 version of the client this spring...

What a colossal marketing cockup

Very few people care about networking protocols, and SFB is explicitly a business communication tool, meaning that most of your contact will be with people who also have SFB. As for the About page of SFB, I can't comment on what it was before, but I've just checked, it now says Skype For Business 2016.

I only know the details because I write software on top of some of the Lync/S4B APIs, and have to deal with customers that are completely confused why one Skype client they have for making calls works with our software, and their other Skype client with a nearly identical icon that they also use for making calls doesn't...

Which app do these users have? If they have SFB, does this not work?

https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Let-users-add-exter...

Do they have IMAP or ActiveSync disabled? You should be able to find compatible replacement clients.

No. They don't really accomplish the same goals, and SharePoint Online is still a going concern.

That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.

OneDrive and Sharepoint are the worst part of O365. After the simplicity of Dropbox "one big drive in the cloud", it's a real pain to figure out how you're supposed to work with OD/SP - and good luck doing it without a dedicated fulltime SP admin.

Not since they replaced the OneDrive for Business Client: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the...

AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.

Sharepoint is to Exchange as OneDrive is to Outlook.

Sharepoint is the server, Exchange is the server. The Sharepoint server hosts Web OneDrive like the Exchange server hosts OWA Outlook Web Access. If you want to use the desktop client for either, instead of the browser javascript, you can download and install the binary.

Is it? "OneDrive for Business", as I understand, is (an interface to) SharePoint, and completely, aside from branding, different from consumer OneDrive.

OneDrive for Business = rebrand of Sharepoint storage, hence the complete separation from OneDrive's consumer (fka Windows Live Mesh) stuff

And here is the dilemma with competing with Microsoft:

Compete with Microsoft and forever spend your time with bug fixes, parity issues, and new features the other guy implements.

... OR create enough of the part that essentially means productivity app, but then branch out into your own space and create a product that differentiates itself and creates lock-in.

Google knows that doing the latter is like a dog forever chasing fox and never winning, so it eventually called timoeut on parity and branched off into doing something new and exciting.

What has google done which O365 isn't doing equally well? Google Docs just isn't very great.

Your may have been downvoted, but it's true. I work for a company that drank the Google coolaid and it was a dreadful decision.

Virtually no one uses Google Docs or Sheets. Instead, they struggle on without it, or have their department purchase an incredibly expensive version of Office.

The Google experiment has failed in our organisation. Google Groups and Gmail is a bit of a disaster. Google can't even do basic things, like relabel all email older than a certain date. And the admin interface is ridiculously slow, and frankly buggy. One time, I logged into this frequently used interface and discovered that I got prompted with a post it note every freaking time. That might not seem like much, but it slowed me down and we are under the pump at the moment.

Overall, Google has such great ideas but is totally let down by an utter lack of polish and a total inability to improve their UX, and ensure that they finish off features and products.

So much potential let down by incredibly simple UX errors. It's unbelievably disappointing :(

The thing about Google Docs is, it looks and has the same functionality now as it did circa ten years ago when I first remember using it. I'm not sure what that department in the Googleplex is occupying their time with.

>The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

Did they ever have it? Did they ever care about it? Google Docs languished for such a long time and Google never made a real push into the Enterprise.

I think they did care, but they just assumed that the same model which worked in the consumer space (enthusiasm among tech-literate people which then spreads to other people by word-of-mouth, but no support whatsoever) would work for enterprise sales. In their defense, it sometimes does (like for Slack), but it's a different ballgame when you're competing directly against Microsoft and their well-established sales channels.

Office 365 in term of collaborative text document editing is still behind google docs circa 2008.

But I haven't noticed any improvements to google docs since the early days. You can't create templates, you can't upload fonts, a million other things that make it not really usable in a professional setting for external communication.

>The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it.

No, Google was never going to own the market segment once MS got into it seriously. Google could only mark time until that event.

We started our company on G Suite, and after about year switched to O365. At the end of the day, there were two big factors:

1. We were still paying a subscription for Office while on G Suite, the cost to change to fully O365 was at worst net-neutral, but definitely saved about $5/mo per head on paper.

2. Calendaring for Google sucks. We're a distributed team, we have recurring meetings, and lots of updates across various devices. Meeting updates were frequently not persisting to users, cancelled recurring meetings were not going away, etc. Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues.

Outlook/Exchange may be 'non-standard' as far as not playing by the specs, but it really is the standard for anyone who's spent time in a big company, and it was getting really embarrassing when our Google Calendar invites were not playing well with our potential and current clients' Exchange systems and Outlook clients.

I do miss the Google Apps sign in to all the various services we use. Some have integration w/ O365 or generic identity authentications, but most either don't or charge a lot extra. Other than that, I don't miss a single thing from G suite that O365 doesn't do just the same or a little better.

We've switched to G-apps at work (almost 2k people in country, and ~20k+ worldwide using it I think). It's nice for some things, but 100% agree - calendering sucks. A few things off the top of my head:

* You can't export a list of meeting attendees into any other format (like CSV or Excel) with their response status without additional tools or Gscripts

* If there's more than 200 people on an invite, you don't get RSVPs

* There's no reliable way to update all meetings in a recurring series - some things you can change, others you're stuck flicking through your calendar and updating each one individually

* The weird lack of support for any rich-text in the body of a meeting - except if you first write it up in GDocs, then copy and paste it. Then it works fine.

* It allows you to update the time of a meeting but not send updates to the attendees. Why would I ever want to do that?

I'd note that both of those arguments boil down to "Microsoft will make your life worse unless you comply". But years in tech support and mail server stuff mean that I loathe Office, and particularly Outlook.

"Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues."

Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite. We use Google Calendar throughout (I worked at Google) and never had problems.

Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite

That is not his problem. That is google's problem. Ironically, thinking that this is the user's problem may be the root of google lagging in this area.

Microsoft Exchange is deeply entrenched in the corporate world. When you send an invite to a client (or vice versa) and it fails due to integration issues, the typical client will be thinking "oh this is weird; I don't have issues with accepting or sending invites to anyone else!". You don't want to be that guy in your client's head.

We weren't. We started on G Suite, we had people (myself included except for personal stuff) who've always been on Exchange- but we as a company didn't start on it.

The final straw really was the problems we were having with everyone else's Exchange systems. If I'm organizing a meeting from Google and you're a client of mine on Exchange, there is a high likelihood that if I have to update the meeting details or change times you will not be seeing the correct information on some or all of your devices.

If we didn't have to interface with other companies, sure- we could live with it. But if I'm paying the exact same money or less to get a service that doesn't have these problems, why shouldn't I switch? It's not like I'm supporting the 'little guy' by choosing GOOG over MSFT.

Our organisation extensively uses Google calendar and the UI that links itself to rooms is so bad that end users call the Service Desk just to make calendar bookings.

I gave up on G Suite after the second time somebody blew away all our documents by moving their Google drive folder. You think they could put a safety check in there when G Drive starts up and the folder is empty, "Do you want to delete everything? or do you want to download again?" And there doesn't seem to be a good way to backup Google Documents since they aren't actually documents but just a link to the document.

I'd distinguish between O365 (crap) and native apps like MS Excel, etc.

In my experience G Suite and O365 are equivalent. Useful for a few things, rubbish for anything serious.

Except that an O365 subscription includes the native apps, so the crappy webapp stuff is just a free bonus for enterprises staying on the good native stuff.

Not all subscriptions do. We're on the bottom rung and don't qualify for the native apps (don't ask why, but apparently for ~60k users it's too expensive). We moved from G apps to O365 and I prefer the former. Yes, some people (finance) need excel but most people use it as a glorified list manager.

$8/m vs $20/m

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-offi...

so that would be $3/4 of a million a year to jump to include all desktop apps.

Just curious, do you also consider the web version of O365 to be a "toy" as well?

I think this is gonna change in time. Yes atm Microsoft is the leader of that industry and yes generally most of the larger companies and mid companies use Word/Excel/PP on a day to day basis.

Although I think the newer generations care a bit less about e.g Word etc and they are also more tech savy on doing hard things on google sheets etc, while the older generations might find it extremely hard to convert from Excel to google sheets etc.

Although another factor is laws etc and privacy policies. Google is much less flexible than office365 when it comes to who owns the data, although of course you have to pay for office365 while for google stuff usually you dont have to pay hence your companies docs might be owned by google and I don't see any sane human being wanting that.

We are talking about S&P 1500 companies. None of them will be using the "free version" of Google docs that come with their free gmail account. The G Apps suite is pretty close in price to the full Office365 package. I simply cant see any major advantage to pay for G Apps over O365.

This...If I wanted my company to pay move to G Apps from O365, my data scientists and accountants would be in an uproar over why we're paying for a worse data analytics tool (G Sheets vs. Excel).

At this point, it's a marginal cost vs. benefit game: the cost differences between the two services are virtually 0 (and if not, getting closer each month), and the benefits show that we have more to _lose_ than gain from the switch.

We are small dev shop - Google suite is cheaper, is good enough and has good integration with paid Gmail.

I pay $15/mo per user for full Office, Exchange, Microsoft Teams/Skype and very decent support.

GSuite is $10/user and offers similar products, but you have to pretty much support yourself.

The $20 extra a month I pay for my small team is negligible.

The company I work for pays even less per person than I do, with the enterprise licensing and the MS cash that gets thrown at us for integrating with them. Our first year of 365 is basically free, same with our switch from our data center to the cloud.

We are looking to save millions a month by making this move.

I pay 3.34 EUR/per user per month. I use Gmail in my company domain - which is IMHO superior to outlook because of tags, which are more expressive than outlook folders. I use apps (some of them not available on Office365 at all - like forms/surveys, websites), calendar synced with mobile, google drive and group conference in hangouts with screen sharing (not working in Office365 in skype on linux - no good app for that)

Since use mostly linux - desktop version of Office365 is useless for me.

To sum it up: one third Office price - no functionality lose for me and some functions not available in Office at all.

GSuite is paid version. AFAIK, they removed the free version. If you have to pay for either of them, and the price difference isn't astronomical, I can see more people choosing office365 over gsuite.

Setting aside the accuracy of the data collection here, is it any surprise that companies prefer an enterprise focused product backed by support contracts, SEs, and actual desktop/mobile apps instead of web interfaces?

Oh, and one cannot overlook the power of Excel lock-in here - the number of business lines run on excel macros in this country is staggering...

Yeah, personally I find desktop apps to be much more usable than shoehorning complex functionality into a browser tab, which is always awkward.

My current company was on Google apps for about 2 years and then switched to Office for the last 2 years. I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it.

I will say the "cloud" evolution of Microsoft Office is annoying. Every time I start a new document it wants to default to saving it to OneDrive and pops up a login window. I just want to work on local files, dammit.

> I can't say MS is better at everything

MS is way better at support, which is a crucial factor in business. Our small company we have found that G Suite had almost non-existent support from Google.

Finding a human at Google to talk to, or even reply to a forum post is very difficult.

if you are paying for google apps, it's insanely easy to talk to Google Support[0].

I've contacted Google Support for a lot of issues (some insanely trivial, and some pretty complicated - both via phone and chat and they have yet to disappoint me).

MS has always been in the enterprise world and they've honed their skills on it. But imo, G Suite is not too far behind when it comes to support - but it is lacking in other areas - like not having native apps.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/?hl=en#topic=29157&contact=1

> I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it.

My employer is trying to roll out O365 to the enterprise. Some of us have been using Google without official IT blessing (due to needing to get shit done in the absence of an official solution) for years.

The biggest pain point so far as been moving from Hangouts to Skype for chat. The UI on Skype is awful - multiple pop up's instead of one page (https://hangouts.google.com/), a native client that wants to update way too often vs a website, and for some reason every new conversation with someone starts a new window even if the person already has one open. It's a joke.

you could always use Microsoft Teams for chat now... (https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat...)

That actually looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.

Teams even works as a fully-functional (i.e. chat, voice, video, groups) replacement client for Skype for Business. In my opinion, it works much better as a SFB client; hoping it eventually just takes over SFB.

One of my uncle's companies moved to Teams recently from Zoom (and Hangouts before that) and I once heard quite a lot of praise from him. Can it be used for personal use? Like in peer to peer?

The company I work for just got on teams, and it integrates with our organization at the Active Directory level. We can do personal chats, meetings and messages, but only to others INSIDE our organization. It isn't a deal breaker, but firing up a screenshare/meeting to a vendor is impossible through it.

Thanks for the info. I have yet to get into a job (will be starting this summer) so I didn't know much about this stuff but am excited.

The client that I am using (which you can download from https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...) keeps all conversations in one window with people listed down the left. I've never seen it starting new windows.

This is an option in the client settings - "Enable Tabbed Conversations". I'm pretty sure it defaults to being turned on, because I always have to go in after an update and disable it to get my conversations popping open in separate windows again.

> This is an option in the client settings - "Enable Tabbed Conversations"

Which client? The OSX client appears to have very limited configuration options.

The OSX client is quite awful. But, under Preferences > General, there is a "Show conversations in separate windows" option.

We're actually on Slack instead of Skype. I feel your pain, Skype was definitely annoying when I used to use it long ago. Slack and Hipchat and Google all have their annoyances, too. I haven't been really happy with any instant messenger since the days of AIM when it only tried to do one thing and do it simply.

I think there is a setting where you can change the default save location to local. I don't know if it disables the popup though.

Office Professional 2016 is $400. The closest equivalent is Office 365 ProPlus (the other enterprise plans add lots of extra stuff not included in the standalone) which is $12/mo. For an upgrade cycle shorter than 3 years, 365 is cheaper. Even for a longer cycle, the standalone is a significant outlay compared to the monthly cost.

So you are comparing a no-risk (since you can always fall back to the native apps) negligible cost solution to the google solution

Active Directory lock-in is huge as well.

We're using G Suite at work and while Mail, Calendar and Docs are OK, the other apps in their offering are atrocious. I'll give you some examples.

Sheets has problems well documented online for years. No recent activity on them whatsoever.

Groups (which is used pretty much everywhere as the only roles&permissions mechanism) are like mailing lists from last century. A separate interface kind-of-but-not-quite gmail threads replies by subject only! God forbid you try to use the "shared mailbox" surrogate.

Directory doesn't even have calendar-integrated birthdays, something which is basic in a company.

There is no Wiki. Its "replacement", Google Sites comes in two flavors: the old ones - feature complete but really dated and the new ones which don't even support tables or mail notifications... Compare that to the superb Microsoft OneNote...

So I seriously wonder: how many people are working on this offering? Is this something Google gives a sh*t about? Do they intend to improve it in the future?

Or should we cut our losses and switch now?

This isn't too surprising, as a paid G Suite user my 'help' experience was better than that of the free version (at the time) but it was still sub-par to the support Microsoft gave for even small businesses that bought 15 licenses to Office.

The killer is that Google still has not cracked the 'support people who don't like to use computers but have to' nut and it is very very hard for them to get there. Until they can get there I don't see them making either serious inroads or serious cash flow from any consumer facing app/device.

Just this morning I found myself unable to switch between two Google Drive accounts, because both of them had the same domain, @gmail.com.

Signing out of a single account leads to all accounts being signed out. Gmail was launched 12 years ago.

Why, Google, why?

Google multilogin should never be used for anything. It sucks and is broken and at some point it will screw up and sync your chocolate into your peanut butter and you'll never get it sorted.

Much better solution is to use two different browser profiles separately logged into those accounts.

If you're a G suite user you'll find a lot of weird corner-case situations where you simply cannot use various services and features elsewhere in the Google portfolio. Want to setup a family account in G Music? Not supported if your account is G suite. Want to check your calendar with the new Google Home? Can't be done if you are a G Suite user. The list goes on and on. It's the weirdest thing, because you'd think Google would want to cater to their paying customers first.

Google's multi-login approach is in the awful middle ground of "works some of the time". At this point I just use multiple browser profiles rather than waste energy on the edge cases that they have failed to support. Having some sites/service only support the first logged in account (e.g. Google Music, Drive desktop client) is really annoying.

Another issue that drives me nuts with Google Drive is that it crashes Lightroom if I keep LR catalog in Drive folder. I either have to shutdown Drive while working in Lightroom or move catalog out of Drive folder.

I don't think I ever had crashes when I kept catalog in Dropbox folder. Once my subscription runs out, I will probably try out OneDrive or go back to Dropbox.

That's a problem of their Google Drive Desktop Sync program. I also hated it (it also sucks a lot of CPU). Since switching to Insync for desktop synching all my problems with GDrive are gone. Google should buy this tiny company for their great work with GDrive.

I agree. Huge fan of Insync.

Thanks, I ll try it out.

The default Google Drive client is pretty basic and limited to one account at a time. Google probably has not prioritized desktop software like Drive. There are third party clients that provide more features like Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com which can sync multiple @gmail accounts to Google Drive.

>Why, Google, why?

Google probably prefers you to keep one account for targeting advertising, plus each Drive account comes with 15GB free space, so multiple Drive accounts give you more free space.

Microsoft put the hard squeeze on EA customers and just turned their reseller model upside down. Most people are forced into paying for some sort of O365 offering, so the path of least resistance is to just go for it.

The other thing is that Google is impossible to deal with. Their product is awesome, but enterprises are a hobby for them. Their field sales and SE force is small and have a limited scope. They come off inflexible, while it's easy to get Microsoft or partners to do all sorts of stuff on a pre-sale basis.

Microsoft has the advantage of interia around the traditional office suite and email. The other services are shit. Skype is an abomination. SharePoint is little better.

>The other services are shit.

Our company (~200+) just started using MSFT Teams, and I find it's pretty underrated. It's not as polished as a Slack/Hipchat, but the MSFT team is super responsive to our feedback, and you can tell they're excited about iterating on it.

I wish Skype was a bit better, I agree - but I'm hoping their recent restructure of the Skype team will help this moving forward.

Hasn't arrived for my tenant yet, I'm really looking forward to it.

I agree they are great at ops and some of the smaller new products. But the legacy of things like Lync/Skype and SharePoint is a boat anchor.

One of my biggest frustrations running my business on G Suite is knowing if the product is something Google seriously cares about.

With Office, there's a predictable schedule of product updates and I never doubt Microsoft's seriousness about maintaining Office hegemony. Meanwhile Google's communications about G Suite updates and roadmap leave much to be desired.

One example of Google not prioritizing desktop software: finally Google Drive for Teams is in the pipeline, delivering a "hard drive in the cloud" concept (helping our team understand everybody has their own drive has been nightmarish). But in the beta testing, they don't support the desktop app at all for sync. What's the point of that?

TIL S&P 1500 refers to the combination of the the S&P 500, S&P Mid cap (400) and S&P Small cap (600) companies: http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/

Office 365 and G Suite are no comparable to be honest. My old company had 365 (Fortune 500 company,) my new one has G Suite (Start-up.) I miss Office 365. I actually just use my personal copy of Office 365 on my own device (BYOD.) Also from a Sysadmin view Office 365 is miles ahead of where older versions of office were. The only problem I suppose is that G Suite is a bit cheaper and it attracts small-mid sized businesses. I do find their offering to be pretty sizable and they keep adding new products to Office 365 to existing members.

I pay for O365 but barely use the web apps. Google's losing IMHO because web apps suck, simple as that. Yes every once in awhile I'll fire one of them up because I need to check something and then 30 seconds later I'll remember why I never use them; slow, clunky, unstable.

Native apps forever (or until the infrastructure is built out more at least.)

And if you have something like a Surface, the native apps have great inking support. Just open up a Word doc, sign it and send it back. The web apps are nice in a pinch, but I find that they have these (probably intentional) shortcomings that make them fall short of doing real day-to-day work. For example, no format painter in Excel Online. That doesn't make any sense to me and these features should at least be available to paying customers.

I'd imagine it's about half intentional, half limitations of the platform. Doing some of the stuff that Excel does in a browser would be maddening.

Anecdata : I tried to switch the company to Gsuite by sharing more and more docs using the personal version. It works well until for some reason they changed the way to create a new document, instead of the classical file > new it was a big "+" sign at the bottom of the screen. Nobody could figure it out and even if they switched back to a more classical ui later (or that we were in the wrong sample of an A/B) usage of drive and Google Apps declined.

Very curious to see what the delta is next time they run this analysis. The trend is really more indicative of success than a single snapshot, I believe.

The trend seems to be going to MS also. Remember that Google pioneered the idea.

I don't think it's true, although the dates on wikipedia might be wrong and I have no time or interest to look on the sources.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_S... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides

Okta has some more info and a lot of blog posts on it.

https://www.okta.com/Businesses-At-Work/2016-03/

That's better data than the original link - thanks.

We're currently going through a migration from G Suite to Office 365, and so far my impression of Office is mostly downright bad. All of the online apps seem like slow knock-off products.

In particular, Excel Online feels like a joke compared to Google Spreadsheets. At first you notice the sluggish movement of focus from cell to cell due to this ridiculous animation. Then when you select a cell value from a drop-down and hit tab, focus moves down instead of to the right, which is infuriating when you suddenly find yourself typing in the wrong cell. Somehow they screwed up copy and paste as well, sometimes pasting takes multiple seconds. Then if you work on something else for a bit, the page gives you an error about inactivity and makes you reload in order to resume. The whole thing is so bad I do my work in Google Spreadsheets and then copy the finished work into Excel Online.

As a developer, one of my primary use-cases for spreadsheets is to generate and maintain an overview of different legacy implementations, the state of their rewrite, and any changes in behavior we've made. This type of work is largely done collaboratively with other devs and project leads. Turns out this type of real time collaboration for spreadsheets is basically dead with Office 365. It feels like we're going backwards in time, I used to just share the document and others would make their changes, but now we're fighting over file locks and in a few cases I've heard of people sending files back and forth with email.

Also, I really miss the "Shared with me" view in Google Drive. With OneDrive there is a separate drive for myself and for each group I'm a member of. When someone shares a file with one of my groups it doesn't show up in my OneDrive, I have to look through each of the groups' OneDrive.

Oh, and the online scheduling assistant is useless when you invite a group of people. The whole group shows up as one "person" who is busy as soon as anyone is busy. Also, noone can see the RSVP status except for the organizer, so when our scrum master is home sick I have no idea who has accepted the meeting. And why do canceled meetings stay in my calendar but renamed to "Canceled: XYZ"?

/rant

I have similar experiences. For a customer I need to use O365, but if you don't need it for some features it really feels backwards. Spreadsheets that kill your session after very short idle times, using multiple accounts gets confused, constantly choosing between Web and desktop version of the software, shared editing very clunky, sharepoint just sucking in general, I can't get used to it.

Office has been around for over 25 years. Most businesses use it, and 365 is included. So isn't the surprise that G Suite (silly name) shows up anywhere on the same scale at all, with it being a third as old?

You'd be surprised by the number of companies locked into Microsoft products.

Willingly, because most competition is actually worse.

Well, in the office space they do make better products and support than all of their competitors.

I am using O365 for my own domain (with only 1 user) and had only great experiences so far. The support is great too!

That's the benefit of a real enterprise sales force who already sell them their Windows, Office and SQL Server licenses. Office 365 is probably just an upsell rather than an entirely new product.

And Microsoft has actual reliable support, unlike Google. It makes a difference when selling into large companies.

Honestly, I can't get this. I use both Office 365 (@ work) and Google (@ everywhere else). And oh boy how sluggish, impractical and featureless Office is. I HATE every second I spend using it. Hell, even Zoho Docs are much more smoother and UX friendly than that piece of sub-MVP piece of software that Office 365 is.

Edit: I wanted just to say that I tried Office 365 on three different platforms: Ubuntu, Windows and macOS. On both Chrome and Firefox. Every time it's sooo slow, even just to list the files in a directory.

Editing becomes hellish (with visible latency) if I type more than a couple of pages (I'm journalist by day).

It's not that Google Drive is better than O365. EVERYTHING is better than O365.

To be fair, by far the most powerful weapon the Spaniards had was disease, not technology. That's what ended up killing millions of Native Americans. So, it's a bit of a weird analogy...

You mean like a virus ?

I found it a weird analogy because I couldn't figure out who are supposed to be the Spaniards. Is it Google because they are up against a competitor that is massively entrenched in the office suite market ? Or is it Microsoft because they seem to be expanding their presence.

O365 is the most unreliable, haphazard, glued together, frequently unavailable piece of $&,$/$! that my team and I have used for 4 years. I can honestly say that I have never in my life experienced such repeatedly unreliable software in my life. Worse yet it's backed by the most incapable off-shored and overworked support team(s) that we now no longer bother to log queries with.

While I use some Google products (AppEngine, GCP, Play movies+music), I don't think they compete with Office 365 where for $99/year family plan my wife and I each get 1 TB cloud storage and all the Office apps that we use on Mac laptops, Android phones, and our iPads. Such a good deal, and once when I needed customer service it was there and someone helped within a few minutes.

May be some big company has access to Google. But Microsoft has much better support for the rest of us, SME or Large Enterprise.

And Google simply dont "get" it. Not Business, Not Enterprise.

Newest Office is pretty nice, they finally refined Ribbon to a point where it is half usable. And Hosted Exchange is simply much better then Gmail. Having used IBM Notes, Gmail and Exchange, I am surprised Exchange works better with iOS out of the box.

I was actually looking for some light weight alternative to Office, Exchange Email, One Drive. But i have find none so far. There may be services that individually works better then Office counterpart, but as a package it seems M$ Ecosystem is hard to beat right now.

Hmm, our office went from using Google docs/office to Office 365 Online, to finally using the desktop version. The web versions of frankly both products seemed just too slow and unreliable.

in other news, water is liquid.

It's important to differentiate the offerings. O365 without access to their desktop apps is a sub par experience that is easily bested by G Suite. If you do have access to the full blown Office apps then, of course, the O365 solution is better. Albeit, MS will make you pay dearly for it.

Hmmm...I wonder why S&P 1500 was the benchmark? It's kind of an atypical bracket for S&P companies to compare. Why not the more common 500, 1000 or 2000?

Is it because the statistics come out in M$ favor when only looking at the 1500 bracket rather than 500 or 2000? Hmm...

No fucking shit! Google makes a product, and then goes to fucking sleep like a little fucking bitch.

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