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Comment by Icathian | Hacker News Reader

I would argue that GSuite, Google Drive, and Gmail (the only things I currently pay Google for) all offer pretty excellent value, even at the free tier (for those which have one).

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I used to think that but G Suite hasn't notably improved in years and I don't think everyone bailing to Office 365 / Teams is doing so out of blind loyalty to Microsoft. Google needs to take the user experience seriously — things which aren't a Real Engineer's Favorite Problems™ are often just as important.

In my opinion, the Office 365 trend still stems from Microsoft's desktop monopoly and everyone being trained/taught on Microsoft Office. GSuite is doing just fine but I know of startups and "hip" medium-sized companies choosing it over Office 365 since so many people don't want to change from using MS Office; having to retrain your employees to use Docs, Sheets, and Drive might be too big of a cost.

My admittedly limited experience with Google's offerings for Docs, Sheets, etc was they were noticeably inferior and limited compared to Microsoft's.

In my opinion, its more likely that professionals who heavily use those tools are going to favor MS offerings over Google's compared to people who only need to occasionally created simple word documents or spreadsheets with a handful of columns.

The more I use G Suite, the more I hate it. There are so many edge cases that I encounter in professional use that I never did when using these tools for personal stuff.

I miss Excel the most.

Part of the necessity of Office at the company I work is that they use macros in Excel to help with certain tasks. Looking at it now, GSheets has macros but I’m not sure that they’re as functional as a VBA macro.

GDocs has found a nice spot in one of our departments as a scheduling tool, though.

As an IT person, I am constantly shocked by the obscure Microsoft Office features users depend on to do their jobs and consider their job impossible without. Often features I personally have never heard of and find unholy and abhorrent by nature.

G Suite has none of those features. Docs has more in common with WordPad than Word. It's unsurprising offices that switch to it end up switching back as Microsoft has finally stepped up it's collaborative editing game.

And that's before we even get into things like Excel and Access which are basically automation for people who can't write JavaScript.

That's just not the case here... o365+Teams is above and beyond a better experience than GDocs, even in Linux... Since January, they even fixed all the issues I had with Teams in Linux (unofficial and official apps).

I really wanted to like GDocs, it's just a really poor experience in general.

In my opinion, the Office 365 trend still stems from Microsoft's desktop monopoly and everyone being trained/taught on Microsoft Office

I agree that was true at one time, but I don't think it's strongly the case anymore.

Users, leaders, and IT departments seem much more open to non-Mircosoft products than they have been in many decades. But for office work, few are able to match what Microsoft offers.

I'm hardly a Microsoft fanboy, and wouldn't use it if my company didn't insist on it. But I can see the merit in going with Office365 for the masses. There isn't really a strong competitor.

Been using G Suite at various companies I’ve worked on for a decade and it’s not improved much at all. Docs, sheets and slides are still limited and the iOS app versions are a joke. All that’s happened is that Gmail gets slower with each redesign. One of the biggest boosts to my productivity was reverting back to the old html only version.

Yeah, my experience recently really reminds me of 90s Microsoft just coasting — except that they forgot to get that level of marketshare first.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18948715 Also Excel not standing still. Google missing opportunities here.

They have made improvements though - Google sheets can now work on Excel format files without changing the format. However they have managed to break copy and paste, with trademark Google lack of service. (https://support.google.com/docs/thread/33960847?hl=en - and I see other problems with borders randomly appearing in pasted cells)

I use GSuite for work, the interface is slower than Eudora on a 486, it breaks a lot of formatting from Outlook users, and for some reason Docs and Sheets documents are confusingly in different places.

It leaves a lot to be desired, I’m not sure Office could be much worse.

I'm generally amazed how well the o365 stuff actually works... I do wish I could edit Visio documents online though, viewing seems to work okay-ish. I'm also not sure if/what they'll come up for Access.

While I like JS, I think the shift towards JS/TS for macros in online versions is seeing some resistance to.

All of this said, still leaps and bounds better than gdocs.

Just for comparison, what percentage of their overall yearly revenue do those three products represent?

That's the point.

The ads revenue subsides other products. And that's always Google's argument of upholding that business model. Google claims ads-supported internet is key to retain the free offering.

I’d pay for Gmail, as all my important personal emails went there. However, I didn’t realize that Gmail was deleting my old emails. If they were more clear that if I didn’t pay, they were going to select, then I’d pay. Now I’m just pissed at Google. If they offered me to pay money to make my deleted emails available, and then lock me into a trivial monthly fee ($10?), I’d jump on it.

Wait what? Is this enterprise where it was deleting old emails?

Do you have a source claiming that Gmail is deleting old emails?

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