Hacker News Reader

Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

I can’t agree with this in 2021, but not for the reasons one might think. I agree that native app development never became a cohesive or predictable thing. But then most apps that people use these days aren’t native.

Business apps: Google Docs & Microsoft Office both have web versions that are good enough for many people.

Mail / calendar clients: I am a nerd who prefers to use emacs for email, but I’m the weirdo—just like anyone who uses a native Outlook client. I also use Fastmail’s web interface, its iOS app, and the mail app on my iPhone. And even that is weird, because everyone just uses Gmail.

Laptop support: Yes that used to be a problem for Linux for varying definitions of “recently.” Used to be. My corp-issued laptop took to Linux just fine with nothing discernibly less functional than Windows.

The apps that don’t exist on the web are getting more and more niche.

View on HN

I do not interact with any professional contacts who use Gmail. It's universally Exchange in my professional life.

This MIGHT be because the invite/accept/scheduling setup in Exchange is so good that it's hard to sell anything else. It also might be that most big orgs are very wisely reticent to host their email with an advertising company.

I'm also gonna push back on the "web tools are enough for most people." I mean, how effective is the web version of Excel, really? Can it easily interact with local data stores for elaborate data mining and updatable queries? My guess is "probably not". How is it for macro development? My company works closely with the finance orgs of our client parties, and let me tell you a LOT of these folks are extremely advanced Excel users. Web tools aren't to par here.

Web Outlook is also pretty awful compared to the native version, quite honestly, as is Word. Maybe PowerPoint is okay, but I'm not a power user of PPT so I don't really know.

Huh, interesting. Since GSuite became a thing I've never seen Exchange in my professional life, so, generously, since 2007/8? I've only had one employer that used Exchange and they sold a setup for it, but even they were switching internally to use GSuite by the time I left, if I recall correctly. I recall the switch as being extremely abrupt in that era.

While this isn't a hard and fast rule, GSuite adoption outside of the "tech sector" is extremely low. We have to recognize our own biases and that the experiences of the average HN reader doesn't reflect the larger business world.

Very much this.

My professional life has been interacting with very large organizations (as clients, not employers) -- think Fortune 500 firms, if not bigger. Major oil companies (I live in Texas), major defense contractors, etc.

These are not GSuite users, generally speaking. It's Office and Exchange in these places. Microsoft is VERY VERY STRONG at the Enterprise level.

I'm in the UK, have also worked a lot with large enterprise customers in Europe and my experience matches yours.

I’ve used outlook/exchange for nearly 20 years at work, with over a decade of that on the web version, which has got progreso ly more featureful as we upgrade (slowly) to more recent versions. Most recently moved to cloud based exchange and it’s still fine - and none of the sync issues that I hear from people who use macs.

The largest players in the tech sector are outlook shops. Except Google.

facebook

Chromebooks and gmail have eaten the education sector, so if indeed you’re right that GSuite adoption outside the tech sector and education sectors, then this will be short lived.

If one user in an org does something stupid will Microsoft ban the entire org with no recourse? I doubt it.

I setup several companies on google apps. Never had an issue. But I would be more reluctant to do so again.

Given that MSFT still sells Exchange that you can host internally, they wouldn't even be ABLE to shut down the org.

> Can it easily interact with local data stores for elaborate data mining and updatable queries?

Pushback -- neither excel nor sheets are the right tool for that job.

Very true, and yet, enormous swaths of the corporate world do exactly this all day every day.

They're not IDEAL and they're not what you or I might choose in a vacuum, but for the people I'm talking about, they absolutely ARE.

- No other tools are made available to them by their hidebound, ossified IT;

- They don't have training in SQL or other query languages, but they are WIZARDS with pivot tables and related technologies.

One thing that's hard for tech folks to really internalize is that tool choice is secondary to results for many folks. That's okay. It's especially ok if organizational factors prevent better or more "appropriate" tools.

It’s a shrinking niche that uses Excel for data things. I’d argue google docs is fine for people who want to make a shopping list at the low end. And the low barriers to using R or Python with Pandas have been siphoning off the high-end of Excel users for years now.

The people you describe still exist, just like me and my fellow emacs users. But we’re not the future.

Let me ask gently what you do professionally, because in our market -- high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers -- Excel is absolutely EVERYWHERE, even with younger clients.

R and Pandas are cool, but they do not appear to be gaining market share from people using pivot tables and Power Query in our market.

My career experience is along the data science / civic technology / transportation engineering & planning / open data.

I’d posit that customers of “high-end project management financial reporting software sold to very large customers” is starting to get niche.

Again, my point isn’t to say that these people don’t exist. My point is that “data wizard” increasingly means not Excel. Plenty of non-tech firms are happy to hire entry-level “data scientists” who write some SQL queries, gin up some reports with spiffy graphics, and bang together a dashboard in Shiny or Tableau. It used to be that this kind of basic reporting work was done almost exclusively with Excel. Even if Excel has exclusivity in some specific industries, Excel’s influence and utter dominance just isn’t what it used to be.

Put another way, I’ve taught intro R / Python skills to enough undergrad and grad students in professional career tracks to see that the future for Excel looks weaker than its past.

My experience is different: most companies I have worked for use GSuite. Also, re: web Microsoft 365 Word and Excel: I used to run Linux on the Desktop much more often than I do now, and the web versions of Word and Excel helped a lot stay in Linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com