Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
geekwire.com
geekwire.com
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.
I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets.
Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.
Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).
- Microsoft Teams is a [bad] Slack clone.
- Microsoft Planner is a [bad] Trello clone.
- Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application
- Sharepoint online for a CRM
- OneNote online for a shared scratchpad.
The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the last year.
- Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful.
- Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.
An example: while searching in your Outlook.com "client" it enters a new state, the search state. When you are done searching there is a left arrow in the navigation panel which you can click to go back to the "normal" state of things. Awkward.
I'm a longtime Windows user, familiar with Microsoft user interfaces, but to me there is nothing to love about Outlook.com.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932226
Issue still happens to me: easy to test switching agents.
Outlook likes to duplicate things. They don't even have smart folder support in their web UI.
Google Sheets was a much better experience for collaboration.
1. Ability to reference a specific person in a comment (e.g. +DamnYuppie please add your thing here).
2. Ability to add/update TOC for a document
3. Comments being owned by whoever wrote them, so others cannot accidentally edit the text of the comment.
4. Ability to notified of and reply to comments by email.
5. Ability to organise documents within my own folder, without creating second copies. (In GSuite, a document is a single thing, even if different people want to organise their own folders differently.)
I also find the UI is hard to get used to. It's different from GSuite, which is to be expected, but it's also different from the desktop version of Word.
Of course I went through a phase of finding that GSuite lacked features that I liked in Excel, but the ease with which you can use Google Docs/Sheets/Slides across devices, and the super-slick display and interaction of the commenting and suggesting features, more than make up for those.
Microsoft's problem with O365 is that they don't want to re-invent anything. Google has the opposite problem in that they re-invent chat a few times a year.
If you look at Teams or Outlook groups, they're just recycling features that exist already. The Office apps are getting better in the sense that they are getting closer to feature parity between the various versions of office -- but they are doing so in a way that will break enterprise IT.
Where G-Suite suffers is in the random features that a small segment of power users swear by. The keyboard shortcuts aren't the same as what people learned in Word/Excel. There are many incompatibilities and rendering issues with the Excel and Word formats. But these concerns apply mostly to advanced users; for basic documents, letters, lists, and tables, G-Suite in 2018 works well
You can do some of these things in open formats like .odt and G-Docs will be better about this. However, there are still problems with things like pagination.
So overall, I think Docs is where you want to be unless you have some super niche use case. I don't have enough experience trying to do crazy things with Sheets to have an opinion on it vs Excel though.
At work I am forced to use windows and have to use Office for many tasks (including SharePoint - talk about a terrible product) and aren't allowed to use GSuite. If I had a choice, I would make the same decision as Airbus
Contradiction. If your key feature is collaboration, GSuite is decades ahead of Office.
By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use.
I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1].
Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc.
The hope was to keep people on Windows, but as people started to shift away from Windows, it makes it much easier for them to jump from the sub-par version of MS Office to other products.
- JavaScript as a scripting language. (It's no python but it's nicer than vbscript.)
- Builtin regex functions (regexextract, regexmatch, regexreplace).
Regarding advanced usage, I just completed a G-Suite project that leveraged some of the advanced features of Google Sheets and was quite impressed. If you haven't done so already, test out the IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML, IMPORTRANGE, FILTER and QUERY (with group by and pivot) functions. You can build some very nice dashboards, pulling data from multiple sources (web, worksheets) and summarizing into one view. I'll admit that the syntax was peculiar at first, but once you get used to it, it's very powerful--even without App Script. As a web developer, IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML is actually pretty fun.
Yes something like Teams (Slack Clone) might be feel a bit betaish. But they are starting to add features such as recording of meeting, automatic transcribing and inline message translation.
I really think they are going to be hard to beat in the future.
Google Apps are a logical extension, as you can use same accounts for Google Cloud and email. There are some benefits of the integration - e.g. export BigQuery result as Google Sheets. They also had a CTO poached from Google.
Also, Google Docs supports exporting to ODS and other document formats... in addition to automatic conversion into Google Drive.
That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects.
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open-source-...
In addition, there are quite a few high-profile open source software packages directly from Microsoft.
Sorry but this is so wrong, Google does not host any of its biggest project on github: Chromium and Android. There were articles written about this.
- A way for users to prohibit internet access per application
- no forced installation of the whole Google Play Services, just to get access to the Play Store
- better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
- less politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
For background data: https://ting.com/blog/ting-tip-for-android-control-which-app...
> - better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?
> ess politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google. How is this politics?
I'm dead certain that some manufacturers would still not ship root, but I'm also dead certain that more would do than do right now, if it was officially supported.
> So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google.
They're not illegal. It was never trialled whether they're illegal. Google did not sue these app developers and did not have a judge confirm that they actually violate the YouTube ToS. They just threw them out of the Play Store, with the accusation pretty much just for PR reasons.
And I'm sure that they would not have won an actual lawsuit. The point in the YouTube ToS that they accused with, basically said that you're not allowed to separate the audio from the visuals of a YouTube video. Supposedly this was in there, to have something against people pirating music through YouTube.
If this were to suddenly be interpreted as it not being legal to have any way of just listening to YouTube videos without seeing it, then tabbed browsers would be illegal, any sort of multi-tasking-capable operating system would be illegal, it could technically even be illegal for users to not adamantly stare at their screen as soon as they click on a YouTube video.
No judge would push this through and no judge would rule someone guilty for not knowing that all these seemingly accepted uses were apparently different to offering background playback in an Android app.
That Google seems to not think much of their own rules would not have helped the case either.
For starters - have you tried to use Android without Google Play Services or its reverse engineered open reimplementation, microG? Android with F-Droid is like a completely different runtime platform than Android with Google Play. It might be a nice platform, but it's different - you can't just switch without extreme changes to your habits and apps you use, even if you don't mind installing closed apps. If you say "Android is open", you really mean something completely different than most of Android users think about when hearing "Android". When they hear or say "Android", they think "Google Play's Android".
I guess they are open source but they exist to line Google's pockets with even more money
Time will tell if it works. If yes prices will go down for everybody.
There's an increasing amount of things you can do with G Suite, almost all our products have APIs and Apps Script libraries.
If there's something missing in our APIs, feel free to let us know.
Almost every single company I've ever seen for 20+ years has open sourced their developer SDK examples. It literally makes no sense what so ever to do anything else.
This has nothing to do with what the OP was talking about which is open sourcing the core app.
You've got to start somewhere. It starts with developer samples, moves into tools, languages (Apps Script), then sub-products.
If you're asking for Google to open source it's products in one big blow, I don't think that will happen without smaller steps. I'm on the team that would probably best start the conversation of considering G Suite in open source. Would love to hear proposals.
Even suggesting that Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides might be open source someday is as unbelievable as suggesting Google's considering open sourcing their search algorithm. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
And yes, I've learned Python, R and SQL, but these tools are not a replacement for the Excel workflow.
With that said, a large majority of users can probably get by with what GSuite offers.
I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.
Not only are they big but a lot of their suppliers are SMEs which in effect are economically dependent to Airbus (even if they carefully avoid dependence to them in the legal definition of the expression).
I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model.
I thought for sure when Oracle bought Sun that this would be forthcoming but nothing came of it.
Perhaps it's because there's less functionality but I'm only making slides for internal consumption, so it just has to hide/show the relevant info.
If you want to hone your communication skills in general:
* Do not add animations * Do not use themes * Force every bullet point to fit on a single line * Points need not be grammatically complete * Use a font size that you can read from more than nine feet away * Talk about - don't read from - the slide
And now, some unconventional advice:
PowerPoint can absolutely replace Vizio, and you should disregard all the rules when you create product announcement decks where style can trump substance. Some of those slides have over a hundred animations and must be split up into three or more pseudo-slides (initial state, N keyframe slides, final state) seamlessly.
PowerPoint is an extremely versatile tool, and its success and failure modes directly mirror the user's.
We would have won, at least, the freedom to use the operating system of our choice. Microsoft software means you eventually need to use theirs.
Installing an additional browser is a nice sacrifice.
For other parts, for example GMail, I've heard that they don't work as well on Firefox.
And to some degree, this is also just what I expect to see more of in the future, as outside of G Suite they're not exactly known for treating other browsers well either. Android Firefox in particular gets bullied by Google a lot. Last time I checked, the Google Custom Search that webpages can embed, just straight up returned a 404 when contacted by a browser with Android Firefox user-agent. And they serve some age-old version of google.com to it.
Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an office suite makes sense.
The biggest challenge (as I saw it) was making sure that everyone could email everyone else all through the transition because if email stops, the company stops in that portion.
All of that to say that even though Airbus is one less than a third that many employees (133K vs 450k) its organization complexity is up there. And keeping complex organizations functional and efficient as possible during a large transition is often addressed by keeping the rate of change manageable (aka slower than you would expect).
That said, the other commenter is also accurate: a "full" roll-out will not mean 100% replacement. Things would break and it would be an irresponsible management decision to force some things that shouldn't be forced.
Source: I led a large MSO-->G Suite migration in a previous role.
Zoho is to GSuite what OpenOffice is to Microsoft Office.
So what I ment is that they traded one evil for a another one.
Don't just repeat cool sentences that don't apply here.
You're wrong here, ESPECIALLY with microsoft.
A lot of Google's smart features technically "read your emails", and they are used on your account whether it's paid or not.
Car companies lay their fate of their passengers in third party tire companies and third party brake companies.
Airplane companies lay their product's fate in the hands of third party engines.
Airplane passengers lay their fate utterly in the hands of some third party pilot.
Car drivers lay their fate in car companies and other drivers.
Spreadsheets? Data? Whatever works best right now will do 99.9% of the time.
The point is, I will not drive on shitty tires if I have a reasonable option of good ones. I will not knowingly fly with a drunk pilot if a sober one is available.
Airbus - and nearly everyone I know - happily hand over ultimate control of their data trove to someone else, seemingly without any pressing grounds for doing so.
And yes, I know that is the way of the world these days, however much I may bemoan it. Witness the snide and micro-agression even here on HN whenever someone dares to differ.