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Comment by virvar | Hacker News Reader

We’ve gone from using four or five different team/project management SaaS tools to using what’s coming with our already purchased office365 for business subscriptions.

I know it’s anecdotal, and while it’s certainly great for us, it’s also quite a lot of money that isn’t entering the market because things like teams and planner are now standard products.

I think the next few decades will be increasingly hard for the SaaS market, because big tech will simply implement the best ideas out there into their current subscriptions.

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It's not a popular opinion on HN but Microsoft really provides superior value with Office 365 [0]. Even though the quality or usability of their products aren't that great, it's good enough for most businesses, many which are too busy getting work done or just surviving rather than evaluating the latest collab/productivity darling that costs another 30-50 USD per employee.

[0] Zoho is the other alternative but even their offerings tends to become expensive once you start using more than a single app.

I'll go further and argue that the quality of Office 365 is actually pretty good, all things considered. A lot of people have bad experience with Office because of all the legacy crap Office is tasked with dealing with, or all the truly bizarre use cases thrown at it.

Current versions of O365 work really well, especially if you spend time at an organization still using pre-O365 versions of Office things.

I pay for O365, and G Suite and Adobe CC (among others) at our small shop. I think G Suite could be the easiest to lose.

And I wouldn't have thought I'd prefer MS over G for Office stuff a year or two ago.

Strong disagree if you’re using OS X. Apps are outdated, broken, poorly designed.

Personally, I’d rather use macOS Outlook or Outlook online than Outlook on Windows. And not because of Windows.

Microsoft has done a good job playing catch up with Office Online and Teams to a point where now it’s pretty much equal with Google. I still prefer Google just because of the interface subtleties, but I can understand the draw to Office for various reasons as well. Competition is good.

I work at Zoho. Would like to recommend checking out Zoho One [0]. Zoho One gives everything a business needs (Mail, Office Suite, Accounting, CRM, Chat and more! It's a huge list.) for 30$/user/month.

Zoho realized this problem of multiple subscriptions a very long time ago. This is what inspired us to work on the depth & breadth of products Zoho offers now.

[0] https://www.zoho.com/one/

Not just from a business perspective. $100 a year for individual use for O365 is a great deal. Six users, 1TB per user for OneDrive and each user can use it across all of their devices - phones, tablets, Macs and PCs.

I don’t see why anyone pays the same amount for just DropBox. Not to mention that Dropbox is basically malware on the Mac.

The big firms still fail quite often. See Microsoft's multiple attempts to get into mobile.

I expect most of the bigger companies to succeed at converting any desktop product to an online version, and get their customers to adopt it, but beyond that I think you'll see a lot of flops.

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