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Comment by jobu | Hacker News Reader

While I agree with most of your points, this one seems arguable:

> Microsoft Excel remains the default lingua franca of business. Google Docs and Spreadsheets has not replaced Office.

Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have taken over the education market from elementary school through college, and for many businesses Google's offerings have become interchangeable with Microsoft's. Outlook and Excel still have a strong hold on larger companies because Google hasn't matched features, but Google Docs are much easier to share and collaborate with coworkers.

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That used to be true but it is no longer - Office 365 has a far higher revenue and growth rate than Google Apps - and when you are a corporate customer, it is far better integrated into your existing IT investments.

I also think Hacker News lens might be focused on smaller companies and startups where Google Docs and G Suite have become much more prevalent.

I'm in touch with lots of accountants and they wouldn't change Excel for anything.

the truth is students and small companies just use google because it’s free for them. this dijesng apply to mega corps

The reality is that more than 4 million businesses use G Suite - including "mega corps".

versus 120 million office 365 users? and 1.2 billion office users.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-office-365-now-has-1...

https://www.windowscentral.com/there-are-now-12-billion-offi...

The biggest public university (free) in my country gives office 365 for free to it's students.

I might agree with regards to Google docs, but I would jump back to excel/PowerPoint the second my company makes it freely available to me.

Google offerings are good, but I frequently find myself wishing they could do more. I use docs/slides and sheets a lot more than Microsoft's offerings. But, that is because I am on Linux and a grad student. Also, a programmers job involves only rudimentary use of all 3 services.

But, when using those tools day in and day out, the small differences make quite a difference . It is similar to using blender instead of Photoshop. Sure, it does the job, but I would use Photoshop if my job depended on it.

Until you need to do something hard. Then Excel and Word are easily the best tools.

I'd like to see multi-version financial forecasting models done in Google Docs. Or a complex mail-merge from Google Docs from a on-prem data store.

There's a difference between online tools that you can use in a pinch to enterprise productivity tools.

I agree with your comment but as it stands the business market is MUCH larger than the education market. Most schools don’t use either or don’t pay much. Schools are seen as essentially a small vertical in the extremely large market. Just think of all the companies who pay for 20,000 microsoft licenses. A lot of the market you describe is free.

The education market is important to recruit future customers though.

The education market is a lot.more important than that .

Companies like Matlab, Autodesk prioritize getting young engineering students familiar with their products, so that the industry ends up adopting their products more willingly.

Just left a place with 17k+ G Suite accounts (K-12). They used free G Suite. Google is ingenious in how they are "certifying" educators on G Suite. The price for the tests are incredibly cheap < $50. They didn't even think of going with Microsoft, even though tiers 1,2 are free with tier 3 being $2 per user? for K-12.

State government is exactly the opposite. While not trivial standing up a shared AD tenet is easy/doable and gives you quick SSO in the cloud for .NET based web apps when everybody (logins) is on the tenet/AD. Quick being the keyword.

> Google Docs, Sheets and Slides have taken over the education market from elementary school through college

Which market? Surely not in Europe.

LibreOffice is now an excellent alternative for both business and home use.

Is it really?

I have occasionally tried open office and clones for a very long time and "adequate alternative" was the best impression I ever got and far from the worst.

Just to be clear, LibreOffice is not a clone of OpenOffice. It is OpenOffice -- the project was forced to change its name for legal reasons.

It was forked from OpenOffice after Oracle bought OO, and most of the core developers moved to LibreOffice https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

So, by any reasonable definition, Oracle's (and now Apache's) version is the fork, and LibreOffice is the main line.

LibreOffice is a continuation of the original development team, and the original code. The only thing they don't have is the name, which doesn't matter much in my mind. So why do you say that what's now called "OpenOffice" is the main line, and "LibreOffice" is a fork? What's your definition of a fork, exactly?

LibreOffice has never been an excellent alternative, IMO. It comes across as a mediocre port of a copy of Excel from 15 years ago.

Teaching users who are not great with computers and who know modern excel how to use some 1999-era LibreOffice Calc software is not fun. LibreOffice recreates the worst parts of menu/modal hell and it's not a place the modern user is good at navigating.

In every case I recommend Google Sheets over Calc these days. So much easier to teach, more intuitive design, and more simply interoperable with the outside world.

While I appreciate the colossal volunteer work that the LibreOffice people have done, I don't like it.

It is in essence the same as StarOffice from Sun, an office suite that wasn't even very good back in the Sun years.

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