Hacker News Reader

Comment by technobabbler | Hacker News Reader

People still use Microsoft? My experience is largely in small medium biz and academia, both of which use a lot of Google. I haven't seen a Microsoft shop in decades. But that's just my own limited spheres of work.

(edit: to be clear, wasn't trying to be snarky. Genuinely surprised. Thought Microsoft intranets were a thing of legacy dinosaur companies, didn't know that modern enterprises still did that. But I don't work in enterprise, only in small biz, where nobody can afford dedicated sys admins and everything is in the cloud. From what I hear though, the UX of Outlook these days is better than Gmail and gcal (which isn't saying much, I know). Might be worth trying again someday...)

View on HN

It depends heavily on the industry, but in my experience the vast majority of the business world runs on Microsoft products. For a lot of businesses (think more accountants or law firms than devs), Outlook, Excel and Word are must-haves. That means Windows is a must-have. That means if you don't have the supporting infrastructure (Azure or Active Directory) then administration becomes a nightmare, so those are a must-have. And at that point, since everything else is Microsoft, Teams gets used for comms and OneDrive gets used for filesharing.

That makes sense.

In the small dev world it's kinda the opposite. Linuxy servers beget Mac dev machines, so AD is mostly out, leaving Apple enterprise stuff (shitty) or Google (OK, but nowhere near as powerful as Microsoft).

GDocs becomes the lowest common denominator and many people don't have Word anymore. Data is either cloud native (json, csv) or else imported into Gsheets.

I suspect some of this is due to the modern educational pipeline too, with gsuite (or Google Workspace, or whatever it's called these days) producing a generation of young workers who grew up on that stuff. It's caused quite a generation gap at my current workplace, where the older workers use Microsoft and the younger ones use Google and stuff keeps getting converted back and forth. And once in a while someone sends a PDF and both sides go nooooo...

I know several security professionals who do incident response and therefore see a lot of IT setup across multiple domains since ransomwares are endemic nowadays, and according to them 99% of the shops they intervene run Office or Outlook(365) in some capacity.

Probably a self-selecting sample?

Also, I'd be willing to believe your average Google Workspace, preconfigured by Google, is more secure out of the box than your average Microsoft LAN administered by somebody who once took a certification course twenty years ago.

But when something breaks on self-hosted Microsoft stuff, at least you can hire someone to fix it. When something breaks on Google Workspace, hey, it's a free vacation day for the whole staff!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com