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Comment by soup10 | Hacker News Reader

Can you guys stop astroturfing here. Nobody is dumb enough to believe that Google is saving money by not using office.

> Nobody is dumb enough to believe that Google is saving money by not using office.

Maybe I'm dumb, why wouldn't they be saving money by not paying for Office? Obviously they could buy it for every employee, including the majority that don't need it, but why? They could also just light money on fire (but why?)?

Office is business productivity software. You don't buy it for every employee, you negotiate a license for the number of seats in use. It has way more features than google docs and is standard everywhere. It's like saying you could save money by having programmers write code on pencil and paper. You saved the money on the computer but you have a net loss because you lost the power and efficiency of real time editing, compiling and debugging. These corporate guys just drink the internal koolaid/spin from hr or whatever and come here repeating nonsense as if its fact and it annoys me. It's dogfooding with some minor privacy/security concerns since microsoft is competitor, we get it, just call it what it is and move on.

> It has way more features than google docs and is standard everywhere

I work for another FAANG and we don’t use MS Word. It certainly isn’t “standard” for us. It’s not standard for two of the three FAANG companies, so “everywhere” is inaccurate. Being popular isn’t the same thing as standard. Pages is a far more usable for the vast majority of use cases. Most people aren’t creating extremely complicated word processing documents in their day-to-day. Word is a bloated mess. Keynote is far easier and more elegant than PowerPoint. Excel however certainly shines for big spreadsheet work, but for most spreadsheet work Numbers and the google spreadsheet are perfectly fine.

This isn't about the merits of excel over sheets, it's about employees coming on the board and lying to promote their company. Google makes 1.61 million in revenue per employee. Honestly it's only going to get worse, because if you see the videos of the company meetings, Sundar was always the super loyalist that would say anything to protect Google or run interference for senior leadership. And now that he's CEO they will start aping him.

Your reasoning is based on the belief that Google is sacrificing productivity by not giving all employees office. GP is directly contradicting that line of thought, which makes the rest of it fall apart.

there is two narratives, which do you think is more likely:

1. Google is dogfooding it's own products to improve them and make them competitive and stop potential data/privacy/security leaks by using external software.

2. Google is trying to save 20 bucks

There is nothing wrong with Google docs or sheets and I have used them both. But sooner or later you make enough documents or work with enough spreadsheets you're going to want or need some feature that office has.

Why should it be an either/or thing? Both are valid reasons for Google to prefer its employees use Docs. However the fact that you can choose to use MS Office without any special permissions somewhat undermines your reasoning in point 1.

Google may be a rich company but it's also a very frugal company in many ways, particularly wrt technology (they pioneered the "huge amounts of redundant cheap hardware" approach to DC construction, for example). When Googlers were being coaxed into switching to Docs from MS Office, the financial benefits were front and centre to that pitch.

Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.

1. Yes, Google probably prefers for people to use its own products both for usability and security reasons.

2. Google also wants to save money. However, if someone wants a license for a Microsoft product, they can get one.

I may work for Google but I am often critical of them. I have no reason to lie in this instance, and anyone you talk to who works for Google will corroborate what I'm saying. Not everything is a conspiracy.

> two of the three FAANG companies

three?

They directly build and sell a competitor.

Google is a large company so they have lots of money, yes. Google also has lots of employees, so paying a per-employee price for anything gets expensive. I can't find a Google headcount vs Alphabet, but at the end of 2019 Alphabet had 118,899 employees. $20/month for each of those employees would cost $2,377,980 a month or $28,535,760/year assuming no annual-payment discounts. Google could absolutely absorb that easily if they purchased Office for every employee by default, or if only 25% of the company gets around to requesting it they can save $21 million a year simply by not buying software nobody asked for or intended to use.

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