How do organisations justify so many lost hours of a day where employees just struggle with Microsoft’s abysmal software instead of doing real work.
Enterprise IT is conservative and full of strange politics that make it really dangerous for an admin team or it department to stick their head out and do something independent other then follow the "mythical industry best practice" and MS is extremely good at manipulating what gets considered "industry best practice" to their advantage and then give just enough discount on the more visible parts of the costs to look cheaper.
And it's a open secret that individual employee productivity don't matter all that much in the kind of back end work where a PC was ever a feasible tool, as what really counts for profitability is the non-pc using frontline staff's productivity, who is far more likely to be issued either no computers or mobile phones or tablet then wintel laptops.
They now are giving teams (slack knockoff) a free dialing number so it now can be used for phone conferencing without non-organizational people.
Onedrive gives you 1Tb of syncable storage per user, and 1TB per user pool for shared office resources.
I spent years as a google apps advocate, but seriously for the money, no one touchs what MS is offering right now. Google had MS hands down 10 years ago, and let google apps die on the vine. It is a damn shame too, because they were the only ones that have anything comparable.
It's just too good to ignore.
On paper microsoft absolutely has the best offering. The ms365 suite has everything anyone could ever need. But, in practice it feels more like a downgrade than an upgrade. Teams does everything, and all of it just as poorly. Office does everything, but the web version and collaboration features are so far behind google they are not comparable. Sharepoint and onedrive seem superior to google drive, but in practice there are many papercuts and people struggle to understand where to put documents and how to properly share them.
What microsoft seems to lack is caring about user experience as they slather feature layer after feature layer on top of their products. What google seems to lack is incentive to actually meaningfully improve their product, because I couldn‘t tell you a single meaningful feature they added to g suite over the last five years.
That's the problem of selling something to the supervisor and not the actual user. MS has had that corporate world as a cash cow for three decades now. They don't care about the end user they just care that their product looks better in the slide that compares it to the best alternative.
And I've never found any documentation as to whether shared OneDrive folders count against the owner's quota, all of the users with permissions quota, or the sharepoint quota.
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/servicedescripti...
But the basics each user gets their own quota of 1 to 5tb,then there is also a shared quota (share point, Ms group storage, powershell online environment, dataverse, etc... ) of 1 to 25tb + (x size per user) the size per user depends on a multitude of factors.
I did not mean to imply that users limits are connected to the shared pool, it is in addition to the user quotas.
You're right, for the money MS gives the user a lot of fairly crappy products (other than the office desktop suite). Google was positioned to own this, and they let is drop. It shows what it means to be a product driven company (MS) vs. whatever Google does nowadays (milk search ads?).
There are teams of people in MS whose only job is to think about how to package something for sale. If Google had a single person doing that they would have beat Slack before it got huge, and could have owned office collaboration software as it all moved to the web.
Fuck teams, though. I will leave this company before migrating Slack into teams. Actively recommending that product is nothing short of professional negligence.
For all it's terrible bugs and login issues, is there even alterative with similar functionality that would be as "user friendly" (as in: non-tech people would know how to use it as well as they use Microsoft garbage?).
I literally can't think of any alternatives that comes close in functionality OR has the same ease of use for non tech people and wouldn't waste even more time.
ReactOS isn't stable enough even in a VM right now – but the progress is nice, and I hope it will be a viable alternative for embedded applications (like ATMs or factory automation stuff). Maybe consumer use one day, too?
Mac is not an alternative functionality to: Teams, Outlook, MS Office, etc? It doesn't solve the MS crappy auth system, it doesn't give (large) businesses the same functionality that MS is giving them.
You can also use any of various other products that compete with them (Google Apps, iWork, Zoom, etc).
Just because MS makes a specific package that businesses like doesn't mean that they can't use something else if MS is becoming more of a problem than they're worth.
We recently discussed this "shadow work": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34612697
I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time so I don't have to reopen 5 different windows and arrange them across three screens for uni work every evening. It works fine.
Mind you, if it was a Mac I'd not even have to reopen or arrange them after restarting the machine - they'd still be there. Although my work Mac loves to randomise which display gets which windows and desktop background... And randomly pan all bluetooth audio to the left ear once a week. I guess all OS's have their issues.
My Win10 Home desktop downloads updates when I'm not looking - and sometimes when I'm actually using the thing - and then reboots all on its own. I have no control over this; there have been occasions when the reboot has happened while I was working.
It happens roughly once a week.
Source: https://lazyadmin.nl/it/how-to-stop-automatic-restart-win-10...
Outlook, Teams, Chrome, COMRAD (radiology RIS), Spotify and InteleViewer (DICOM viewer). Without restarts Spotify stops working, the software loses track of what day it is (it assumes the day prior) and things get slow or unresponsive.
Maybe it’s the software and not the OS. I run all those except COMRAD on a Mac ok though.
Mac and multi display and window location is a special hell. My father is a heavy Photohop user and palette organisation is a daily battle with multi screen. When screens wake up windows and palettes reorganise if the system detects one screen and not two briefly. It’s a big drain on productivity.
Awkward… no, I haven’t dug into it at all. I now will.
If my org doesn’t give me a supported way to do absolutely necessary thing X, then I’ll find my own way to do it.
MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.
And everything just works out of the box with like... 3 lines of PowerShell.
You can replicate some of it with Ansible, sticky tape and a few spare weeks, but it's not the same at all.
I'm actually Linux admin, grew up with open source and spent my career serving pages and automating myself out of a job. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but for enterprise use they are _next fucking level_.
Maybe they all need nonstandard software? God forbid, maybe they need administration permissions, but the org doesn’t want to give it to them, so they end up calling in every other day to get something unlocked (I know that’d be true for me).
Maybe it’s the problem solving skills of the IT team when it comes to mac, so people keep coming back with the same issues (good ones are Outlook/Teams being permanently broken, or VPN not connecting).
On the whole, I’d steer away from any explanation that would require all 500 mac users to be idiots.
You more or less need to be a dev-ish person to prove IT is at fault. The lusers have to live with the unplug the computer and reboot workarounds.
This, at least, is a thing I have never even had to consider as a remote possibility on Linux.
It's not an argument not should it be used as such.
It’s not an argument nor should it be used as such.
Apple is really bad too, but there not as bad in the dark patterns market at least in the OS. But they are way strict with their walled garden approach to everything so I wont support them either.
Linux can be buggy at times, but I feel much safer using this OS then I do Windows or MacOS because Microsoft and Apple don't really seem to care to much about the ramifications of their end-user hostile decisions.
This is also related to trying to control the circulation of replacement parts by attempting to force independent repair centers to regulate how parts are distributed. Apple takes more of a "You don't know what you are doing, so we have to guide you in the right direction" approach that doesn't sit too well with me. Apple can be wrong, a lot, about how their decisions effects people's freedom to decide how to implement there own security and ways of retiring devices. Apple should be in the business of making hardware and making it usable. Not being a parent, deciding how people are going to use and secure their devices. Maybe leaving that to an impartial organization that works with apple. Too many conflicts of interest for me.
Which is like, wow, half a mil a month, but... also alarmingly little!~
Apparently the backward compatibility monster is not the size it used to be?
Now I understand why Win11's designers used Macs... wow the moat got small
you can try to find as many edge cases,
but at the end of the day I just log into the account that's inside domain and everything:
email, teams, network accesses, auth thru web apps goes thru that domain account
Because I tried to do that recently with O365 and I literally couldn't move my subscription without killing the old one and creating a new one.
Every other software service I use somehow managed to make it easy: fill in the new billing details. Done.
But not Microsoft. Billing and fulfilment details are on different pages, there's no obvious way to get from one to the other, and if you want to change country you can't.
Superb.
Even having physical copies of The Economist follow me, with the same subscription, was easier.