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Comment by logshipper | Hacker News Reader

This is a good and thorough article. The author got down to brass tacks pretty quickly and brings up interesting hypothesis about $MSFT.

That said, I do have one gripe:

> To oversimplify Notion to its demographics, it is Office 365 for people below age 35.

I recognize this is an oversimplification, but even so, it seems like a stretch. Notion is a decent product, and I have used it for a few small-scale team projects in uni (mainly for Kanban-related stuff) - but to call it a replacement for O365 is an exaggeration at best.

Yes, you can have pretty, nested documents in Notion and that's great, but a tabular database in Notion is by no means a replacement for Excel or even Google Sheets. The velocity that is afforded by Excel in terms of formulas is unmatched and there's a reason it has yet to be unseated as the kingpin of modern finance.

Most young people I know use a combination of Discord + Google Suite to collaborate. I am aware this is slightly anecdotal, but I am also having a hard time imagining myself as a founder and then asking my CFO to use Notion to prepare investor pitches.

Source: Am 23 :)

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> Discord + Google Suite

I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

I cannot explain what puts me off, but Google's (gmail) login page and way better switching between apps feels way better.

Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.

God, if you have personal and work accounts under the same email bring on the insane pain. There is sometimes confusion on the MSFT backend (or was) in these cases and you'd get jammed into weird corners (ie, reset would do just your personal so you couldn't ever get a work account reset etc).

It's something about their federation tech vs google. Google, if you are in wrong service, nice switch account, one redirect it feels like.

Exactly. this is such a pain, especially if you happen to be apart of one organization that's AAD Connect and one that's full AAD (Azure Active Directory).

As far as I can tell, the easiest way to switch users is to go to https://www.office.com/login?es=Click directly (?es=Click is important) which will present you with all the accounts you're 'Signed in' with, even if office.com has you locked into one. Then you can use the app switcher to switch domains, which ensures the correct account.

I thought this was bad, then my work changed from on-prem AD to Azure AD. Now my account is "linked" to my computer, and the only way I can log into a different Outlook inbox is by opening an incognito window.

It really does feel like something is broken on the back end of Microsoft's SSO, but I'm sure it's just so complicated with decades of cruft that it's hard to dig out.

Same here but with the added pain of an early "onmicrosoft.com" account that splits our users between their domain and ours, doesn't let me use my work domain address, and yet denies the onmicrosoft.com one access because it's not a "work or school account".

It's seriously bemusing to be logging in to an organisational account with admin access only via a personal Gmail account username but there's literally no migration path for these early adopter accounts.

I wonder if this is a generational thing. If there's a decent app for a thing, I use the app¹. In this case Outlook. I have 4 email addresses to manage my personal email, throw-away registrations, website comms, and website SSL/admin.

I never access any email ever from a browser - Outlook is unbelievably good, and with the .PST file size restrictions no longer being restrictions I have my entire email archive of ever in it. Been doing things like this since 2002.

¹ Social media is the exception. Where I have multiple social media accounts (Instagram) I use seperate browsers (Edge for hobby account, Firefox for personal account). This is not ideal but the workflow is easy.

Have you tried multi-account containers in Firefox? I've found it less painful than multiple browsers.

Ye there is something fishy about Office365 login. Sometimes the account switch for no good reason. Even if I just entered the username and password in a prompt.

It is a great mistake login in on different accounts on the same computer ...

> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

I dread logging into any Microsoft product for this reason, I just know it’s 30 mins of BS trying to find different passwords for different accounts, none of which relate the thing I’m actually trying to do.

And it carte blanch refuses to work in lynx or links too, even if the site behind an SSO login would work perfectly. Bah.

This is getting downvoted quite a lot. I don't understand why. There are lots of legitimate uses for a text-based browser, from quickly looking something up on an SSH session to trying to script something. Servers are often placed behind an SSO wall and Microsoft's authentication regime means that you can't, for example, curl server/data without passing a token coming from a graphical browser and a whole world of pain. This is explicitly a design decision from Microsoft: you need to support javascript to use their SSO login.

A password manager and the Authenticator app makes it dead simple

It's really not. I have no problem remembering or calling up the passwords or emails for my personal, Xbox, current work, previous work, or previous student (!) accounts. And yet Microsoft somehow gets them confused; I haven't ever signed in with this PC or from this ItoP address to my student account, the email no longer works, and it obviously can't access my work document...but something is tied together there and MS insists that must be the account I want to use. Private windows don't always fix it either, there's something shady going on behind the curtain.

Contact support and let them know you have multiple accounts and these issues. I thought they were going to be clueless but they were able to resolve some of these issues quickly behind the scenes.

It does not. I have some combination of my work, school and personal microsoft accounts signed in across a couple different computers. It seems to randomly pick one based on some really poorly inferred context. For example, going to outlook.office.com will (usually) load my personal Outlook email. while going to outlook.office365.com (which redirects to outlook.office.com!!!) always loads my school email.

All of my accounts are meticulously password-managed. The ONLY Google property with this problem is Forms. With Microsoft, the entire authentication system is a disaster. Did you know you can sign into your microsoft account with a security key if the moon is waxing crescent, your computer is at least 3 OS updates behind, and you recite a secret incantation?

I got locked out as an admin of a Microsoft 365 workspace while using password manager. I still haven't recovered the account. You can only recover your account by contacting their support on mobile but they are clueless.

I have a feeling they truncate or santise password somewhere.

I switched to gsuite immediately.

As much as I hate using Azure, the integration of DA makes it so simple. The login screen just lets me select which account to use. That's it.

Flashbacks to when i started a new job and just got the credentials for microsoft 365 but for some reason even after logging in through my work email the service seemed to be tied to my college email had to open an incognito tab for it to work

Anecdotally, O365 products always felt like disjointed attempt by various engineering and sales teams to put a modern spin on the client side offering. In these contexts, it never had to be good - but just similar enough to the old products that excel, word, and outlook power users would use it and find value.

GSuite, Notion, Confluence, and others appeal to an audience that either never required MSFT office nor felt the need to become power users in it.

I use gsuite for my own needs, but unfortunately whenever I deal with anyone on the non-technical side (marketing, support, etc) I always need to switch to word/excel/powerpoint.

I have been waiting for this to change, but I can't yet free up the gigabytes of space on my work laptop that is currently occupied by MS software.

I don't know why people like gmail so much but I found gmail's design, or Google's Material language in general, really bloated. Outlook.com has a flat and simple layout. Of course it's inferior to gmail in search and I don't understand why they makes me type out the "@outlook.com" part at login.

Another reason I use outlook is that I already gave everything else to Google so just diversify a bit.

>I don't understand why they makes me type out the "@outlook.com" part at login.

Probably due to that's not the only address they support still - I've got a hotmail.co.uk account and outlook login page for me.

Another thought is universities and other groups use outlook as their MX signing in via outlook.com which can then redirect

Yup - my old LSE e-mail was via outlook.com

gmail has the same thing, but username will autocomplete to @gmail.com unless otherwise provided

If only they had different websites or domains to use for those different login pages.

> but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

Until you:

- Use Google Drive and its subpar desktop experience of sync'n files (OneDrive is far worse, but Dropbox+MS Office beats it out)

- Experience Gmail's hostile user stance against non-Google calendaring. (1) Automatically creating Google Meets for every invite (or did they fix this recently?) and (2) the terrible formatting that gets sent to non Google-based accounts that gives me the "fingers on the chalkboard" feeling every time it gets sent to my O365 based email.

> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

100% agree.

> Also I have feeling that MS account is more "formal", idk how to explain it.

Agreed. And I feel like anyone who sends me email/cal invites from GSuite are essentially amateurish. Can't explain it either.

Desktop experience? This isn't the 2000s grandpa.

There is no web substitute for Excel yet, especially when you get into bigger files.

Because at web scale you don't use individual files.

> I hate MS login page and endless redirects between their services

whenever I login to Gmail it redirects me to YouTube and then back to Gmail

> I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

Here's my libre stack:

  - Thunderbird for e-mail (whichever provider you like, i also self-host a mail server for automation etc.)
  - LibreOffice, which i use as a local piece of software, because web office apps rub me the wrong way
  - Nextcloud, which i also self-host and which has both desktop software and mobile apps

Of course, that's not something that everyone might want to use for themselves, but personally it has worked out pretty nicely for me, allows me to keep my data private (for the most part) and is a rather cost effective way of doing so!

It is a running joke in our team that MS cannot even implement a login page without problems.

To be fair, the authentication for Microsoft is far more complex than any other comparable system. They have to deal with their own Microsoft accounts (Outlook, Live, Hotmail...), federated domains (via ADFS or third parties) and domains hosted in 365 too - Some of those being synced passwords from AD, some of those using pass through authentication from local servers...

Google just has to deal with accounts with Gmail domains and third party domains that they host.

I totally get that. This is why it would make sense to implement login a way that it is obvious to the user what is happening. I am not sure how much time I wasted on trying to figure out which system I am logging in to and with.

Yes, the article is good but that's where it goes off the rails. There's lots of talk about how MS has 96,000 "talented engineers". Yeah? Where are they then?

My experience of Microsoft products in the past decade, both Azure and Windows, as a developer, has been extremely poor. The decay inside the Windows org has been very sad to see in particular. Windows was never exactly bug free but it had a certain robustness about it simply due to the sheer weight of apps using it. The Win32 docs were extremely verbose but mostly did tell you what you needed to know. But, those apps have been evaporating for 20 years and it shows.

From the perspective of a developer trying to do stuff on Windows in 2022 is an exercise in frustration. Nothing modern works right and their developers don't seem to know or care. Trying to do absolutely basic tasks using their recommended approaches will yield an un-ending stream of stupid, impossibly basic bugs. To name just a few bugs I've hit in recent times: they've managed to screw up things as simple as taskbar icons, downloading files from web servers correctly and restart apps after an upgrade. I never thought I'd find myself actually liking Win32 but it does at least tick all the boxes and the standard code paths are bug free.

Nothing about this experience radiates experience or talent. It leaves you with the constant impression that everyone working on the Windows team is a new grad who learned C++ 3 years ago and is shielded from the reality of what their customers experience by a wall of even less talented program managers whose primary job is to post vague reassurances and empty promises to (badly implemented) web forums.

That's Windows. Azure was little better. Again my experience was one of incredibly simple bugs in basic functionality, like holding TCP connections open for more than a few minutes. The fact that people keep finding "root@azure" bugs is also indicative, because usually these reveal that there's no defense in depth of any kind.

What you’re experiencing isn’t the result of bad engineers, it’s the result of business decisions that prioritize new features of testing. There are many talented engineers in Microsoft (as well as some terrible ones) but they don’t have full control over the goals of the business.

Exactly this.

For my professional stuff I’ve actually dumped O365 and Google.

I’m using Apple stuff only (pages, numbers, keynote, mail, calendar, reminders, icloud). It’s completely different to anything else and there are a few small compatibility issues but it works really really well and doesn’t stab you in the face with complex problems. Add zoom and slack and you have enough interoperability.

I set three simple standards that I will not budge on which ensures this solution will remain working. Documents via PDF only. Copy via cut and paste on slack. Data via CSV and JSON only.

I also only use spreadsheets internally to my “partition”. They are shitty for everything else.

I’m not going into the long time rants with my extensive experience with O365 and GSuite and LibreOffice here but this feels like I’m being shafted the least hard at the moment.

I think Excel is the main moat on people/company keep using Office. Even the spreadsheet product on macOS is unmatched. I think it's the defacto tools in the salaryman-world for any backoffice work requiring some spreadsheet app.

I know an avid iOS fanboy that uses Excel on Windows for their main job, it's on a different level than its macOS counterpart.

Yes that’s true. There are better ways to solve all the problems that spreadsheets solve but no one way of solving them all in one place as badly that’s quite as good :)

That hurt to write.

Zoom and Slack are defacto standards which have similar issues as O365 and Google.

That said, I love Numbers. It has some features like easy to use formulas right out of the box. I'm not able to do it that quick/easy with any other spreadsheet product.

However, given I don't use Mac on work as now, I'm bound to Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel.

> I use shitton of MS products, but I cannot switch from Google's gmail, docs and drive to anything.

This is how other people feel about the Office suite FWIW.

I'm usually in Teams all day. It's our VoIP, file share, and chat. We have scheduling, notifications, interactive web cards, and multi-user document editing all in there as a single interface.

I get that that it's a duck-on-water front end to OneDrive, SharePoint, Skype-for-Biz, etc... but it works well enough to get things done.

I can't stand google docs myself, or using gmail for actual business emails.

I'm stuck on Notion since my much older CTO thinks Notion is 'hip'. I think it's more fair to say Notion is just the counter culture solution to the same problem O365 and G-Suite try to solve. I suppose Notion kind of made sense back when were tiny, but these days Notion is just clunky and has one of the worst search functions I have ever had the displeasure of using.

At least it apparently isn't doing well in our security audit and the security team is telling us G-Suite is in our future.

I’m there with you on the search function. I have no idea what its result ranking algorithm is, but I’d love it if the top results were ones with the exact search string. Instead, we get “You searched for AWS. OK! Here are pages with awl, Australia, House, lasagna, [8 pages], Google Wave, and AWS.”

I haven't used Notion much but if the search is worse than G-Suite, that is bad indeed. G-Suite search is so bad I sometimes wonder if I'm being trolled. Google is supposed to be king of search, yet I can type in one of the words in the title of a document that I was editing a few days ago, and it won't find it, but it will find some obscure and completely unrelated string in a csv file from 2014 that I haven't opened since I uploaded it. To work around the horrible search, I literally keep a google doc that starts with AAAAA so it will always be at the top that has a bunch of links and keywords in it. When I need to find a document or spreadsheet or whatever in google drive, I Ctrl+F in there and it's a life saver. Also seems ridiculous that I have to keep my own index file in order to find anything.

Try cloudsearch.google.com. It works much much better than the GSuite search.

That's pretty nifty, thank you!

(But isn't available for G Suite Legacy, for anyone idly curious.)

I can't imagine search worse than teams (which often fails on the literal exact text from earlier that day). I'm so sorry.

Don't even get me started about problems in Notion. It is so depressingly bad that it makes me hate one thing I really like about my work: writing. The search is just broken, but even more broken is the user interface for writing. All kinds of weird things happen if you click your text or start a code block and move your cursor to the wrong way.

What I do nowadays is I iterate my texts in Org Mode, get the comments on GitHub and when we're all happy about the text, I import it to Notion and lose the writing to the black hole of Notion search forever. Now when they have a public API, I'm thinking could there be an Emacs plugin that could sync the text between Notion and Org Mode, that would let me keep my texts in version control? I guess that's just a matter of time...

I feel like Notion and GSuite (Docs mainly) solve two very different problems.

The thing that Notion brings (which I found hard to work with in Gsuite) was that shared documents aren't owned by any one individual, and copies are far less likely to proliferate. So its good for shared documentation that an Organization needs, as opposed to two people collaborating on a document, which google docs handles fine.

The basic tables and cards and stuff are nice for many things but are not a substitute for sheets by any stretch of the imagination. And Notion has no analog for Slides.

Lotta people make this mistake. They think Notion, or Google Sheets, or Slides is the only tool they need. In truth they need all three, depending on the task at hand.

Lots of product managers seem only capable of thinking in slides when Notion would be better for documentation. I've received 500 pages of content for review written into CSV file for some insane reason. And yes, I've seen people struggle to run mathematical models in Notion when Excel is right there.

I try and remind people not to use a hammer when you need a screwdriver, but sometimes that's all they know.

There's a pattern underlying the claim:

The reasons why the modern productivity suite is winning (Notion, Coda, Airtable, etc) is because they've embraced the web and collaboration.

- ability to share the original source to people

- tag people right inside the document.

- set tasks to people and track them from within the doc.

- new age collaboration features - likes/comments/hashtags built-in

- ability to tag a document within another document

All these are small steps towards embracing the web's nature deeply inside product instead of just shipping the native features to run over the web.

But there's a catch, these modern solutions tend to lag a bit over the powerfulness of what native offers, like

- powerful charting capabilities

- the calculation engine of excel

- pagination of documents

- powerful set of formatting features

Interestingly it's much easier to build the new age features into the already powerful editor than vice versa - which is why google docs pivoted towards smart canvas features instead of launching an all new app.

For what it’s worth, Loop[0] is an experimental Notion compete that seems to be targeting its demographics.

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-loop?ms.url=micros...

IMHO the most important period for microsoft is the 90s. There is nothing about it in this article. 1990 is windows 3.0. In 2000, it was the start of Ballmer's era with the erratic management.

It depends on what O365 means to the user.

A lot of people (me included) aren’t using Excel beyond opening the files to look at the graphs or entering data in predefined fields. It’s the usual 20/80 split between the people actively creating and managing the data and the ones on the receiving end.

For a long time Microsoft pushed Office adoption by forcing the “viewer” to have licenses to access the data. That’s why a company would buy Office for every single employee. But now, you can have Office for the “20” part, and have them push their result to Notion for everyone else to view, do simple things with it.

Notion can effectively be a O365 replacement for the proverbial “80” part.

(Basically O365 is becoming a “power tool” and Notion can skoop the “casual users” slice. I see G\Suite inbetween)

No, because Office 365 is also the email hosting , MS Teams , Windows 10 enterprise license and management of the computer with Intune.

So you still need Office 365 for each user.

And then, why pay for 2 tools when you can pay for 1.

Don't forget optional Power Apps!

This is the biggest reason MS remains a huge player though. Whether you're using Microsoft's cloud e-mail or an onprem exchange, they'll be more than happy to figure out a CAL bundle that is compelling.

Email is pretty important. You really think a company would pay for Office suite, Notion and Gsuite? You are insane.

And CAL is not used for Office 365 sweeite

I'm saying the exact opposite, that they won't.

> And CAL is not used for Office 365 sweeite

No, it's not, but they are used for exchange last I checked. Perhaps my verbiage was a little inaccurate, but thank you very much for the downvote and condescension.

You are right in that Microsoft is the giant pillar sustaining a ton of big and small companies, I'd randomly guess more than 90% of them.

Macs and GSuite are more of a long tail that anything, but these would precisely be the companies that would go to Notion I think. They will have way less incentive/lock in to push Office365 on the bulk of their employees.

> For a long time Microsoft pushed Office adoption by forcing the “viewer” to have licenses to access the data

There have been free, no-license viewers for MS Office files since the early 00s, if not earlier.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/supported-versions...

I'd wagger these were just excuse programs aimed at releasing regulatory pressure. Employees working on them might have put their best efforts, but they were inherently flawed and limited beyond just the "viewing" aspect.

A long time ago of my employer tried to skimp on a license and we tried those instead, just to give up after a day and buy the whole package.

I wonder how many people just had the same course, and we were visibly not alone: https://www.mrexcel.com/board/threads/using-macro-enabled-wo...

They couldn't enable viewing of truly crazy files without shipping the rest of the elephant with it.

And Word users never listened when told to only share RTF files instead of DOC files, except maybe early on when dealing with how Mac and Windows version files were mutually incomprehensible (RTF was kept at feature parity and documented all the way to Word 2003, precisely as interchange format)

A lot of people didn't understand there could issues at the base level. They were exchanging files with their colleges on IT provisionned machines and didn't have to mind what they were using, on a day to day level they had no issues, it was the people "outside" that were a PITA always boyhering them.

Also biting the bullet and being on the latest version of Office with everything from Access to Outlook installed sadly covered all the bases. We worked on an intranet for a smallish company and they had web components that only worked with the specific Office DLLs installed. Took us an afternoon to figure out why it didn't work on our machines.

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