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Comment by gaogao | Hacker News Reader

Where do you see ChromeOS and Google Office as falling flat in that regard? Desktops are pretty smaller in market size compared to laptops these days.

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Google docs/etc are totally eating into Microsoft Office's market share. I can't remember the last company I was at where they expected us to use Microsoft office products. But we used Google docs,sheets,etc constantly.

For big corporates, it is still 100% Microsoft Office and 0% Google Workspace. Email is still 100% Microsoft Outlook/Exchange. That said, for small to medium, Google must be eating into MSFT, but I don't have any visibility.

As someone that works at an IT company, not a software company, Almost every customer that started with google is switching to o365. Nearly 99% of our clients are on o365 or are switching from on-prem exchange to o365. I can see maybe the bubble of silicon valley might be more oriented toward google, but the vast majority of businesses continue to migrate to o365.

O365 is really starting to get tons of traction even with the mid-sized companies.

M365 the far superior solution to many business problems. As a long-time paying gmail customer I'm also moving away. It looks like Google didn't improve UI in their admin menus for at least a decade.

Some people would pay extra to not have the UI change every couple of years. As someone who no longer regularly uses Windows it drives me nuts to try to find anything in their web apps or settings interfaces.

Do you prefer it, or is it simply a cost saving measure? GSuite is substandard even compared to Open Office.

The only benefit, and it may be a big one, is real time collaboration and document sharing.

O365 has the same real time collaboration and document sharing. I worked at one company they were originally on Google had to share the enterprise plan by the parent company for “money reasons”. People just kept using Google until the account was closed 12 months after migrating. When I left they were going back to Google.

My current employer is pushing us to Office 365. We have a lot of meetings that center around a shared document. The syncing in Word is extremely slow and in Excel we gave up on it entirely because we got constant merge conflicts with no clear way off fixing them. Outlook web is very slow and sometimes stopped fetching new emails till you reload. Meanwhile outlook for Mac silently doesn't show more than ten all-day events which lead to massive confusion during the holidays with our shared OoO calendar.

I understand that some might see offline storage and editing as advantages, but I've only seen it create chaos. It makes the file save dialog much more complex and I constantly have non-technical users mail files around like it's the 90s because they don't understand how to share it properly.

I'm very confused to see people pushing O365 as a viable alternative to GSuite for collaborative documents. It's not even close.

It’s really not that hard to find data on GSuite vs Office market share that isn’t anecdotal

https://www.saasgenius.com/blog/why-office-365-is-overtaking...

The only "data" I see there is a couple survey results from 2016.

Major enterprises are not going to GSuite.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3637079/as-google-move...

> Google grew its share of the productivity software market to 10.3% in 2020, according to research from Gartner, taking about 2% from Microsoft. Microsoft is still the clear leader however, with 89.2%. Overall, the productivity software suite market grew 18.2% during 2020.

My point wasn’t about the market share, it was that you decided to be condescending about not having relevant data, and then you also failed to provide any :)

For a business environment, Google Office is terrible compared to MS Office.

The features and functionally of Google office are very limited, especially when you compare Sheets to Excel

This is the only part they aren't on caliber in most cases. I rarely hear Slides or Docs isn't as good as PowerPoint or Word (even though, at least on paper, Word and Powerpoint have more features).

It seems that the sticky moat is Excel (and to a lesser extent but gaining somewhat rapidly, the Teams integration into 365. Google has blown it on being the enterprise chat solution).

Seems Google could chase this to close this, but Microsoft Excel is just absolutely sticky

Word is too, at least for lawyers. A whole generation of lawyers has spent 20 years learning the intricacies of cross-references, page/section numbering, styles and formatting. While some of that is possible in Google Docs, it's clumsy and uses much different conventions.

Just to clarify, I do know that Word fills some niches better (through both feature set and inertia). I know there are universities that still send their post doc writing standards out as word templates and they don't always translate well to Google Docs either.

That said, I think Excel is the exponentially higher case and hardest to replace. The niches filled by Word that Google Docs can't fill readily are pretty small comparatively. Excel has grown to mean so much more than just spreadsheets. Its pretty much a first line database to a huge amount of the business community, and still relied on across entire industries to do work, from wealth management to accounting to payroll to inventory etc.

I have, upon thinking about it as well, to hear any raised point about PowerPoint vs Google Slides where PowerPoint does something so niche that Slides doesn't and its a deal breaker, actually.

Or <null> to Visio. Visio is huge where I work. Being able to cut and paste technical diagrams into complex Word documents is a really important for our uses.

I have replaced visio with drawing.net for 90% of use cases

By desktop app they don't mean an app that runs on desktop computers only. They mean an app that runs locally and not web-based. Office 365 desktop vs Office 365 web portal. Google doesn't offer anything but web based.

I'm not sure that would have changed anything, though. Their main loss is that ChromeOS isn't marketed as 'business-oriented' but that's probably because you can't market it to businesses when tons of legacy software doesn't run, and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience). But when businesses do use GWorkspace products, it's not an issue that it all happens within the browser.

You haven't been in a business environment then. Almost all of the users whine about having to use Google's Web Apps and prefer the desktop version of 365. Microsoft absolutely dominates in the enterprise environment. We have both, just because department will not use the Google Apps. They'll accept Gmail but that's it.

You are misattributing the cause. It’s not because they’re web-based, it’s because they aren’t *really^ Word, Excel, etc. I’ve shot myself in the foot one too many times with the web-based Office suite. There’s a reason there’s a nice big button to bounce you to the desktop applications - for when you need to do something they didn’t bother putting in the web version.

Eh... I think it's both. A lot of end-users don't understand understand what a web browser is. The older crowd is completely weirded out about running an app in their browser.

It could just be my circle of influence which is mostly SWEs, but nobody complains about Google and most prefer it. Maybe it's because doing anything on the web version of M365 is hell on earth if you have the audacity to be signed into more than one account at once.

You think the chief users of Office apps are software developers?

I don't think software developers are a good measure. They're not heavy users of any sort of word processing.

And as an an Admin, GMail is awful. Microsoft knows what admins need and give them to tools to do it. There is so much that can't be configured with GMail, and they don't even provide a proper cmd tool like Microsoft does with their powershell modules. The only option is "GAM", a third party not supported by Google project [0].

Another example, the default routing rules page in the admin console defaults to only showing 10 rules. Every time you add a rule, the pagination is reset, so you get lost where you are and can't even see the rule you literally just added.

And as an identity platform, Google is nothing compared to Okta or AAD. Whilst it's wonderful that Google login is everywhere now, I can't for example, request the user do 2FA for particular apps.

Even the admin console only requires 2FA once a month, it's ridiculous.

And don't get me started on "groups" still being attached to distribution lists out of the 60s [1]. Or the inability to have shared mailboxes.

No one should ever choose Google Workspace over Office 365.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/answer/10014088?hl=en

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35070618

Yeah I agree. You shouldn't have to use 3rd party tools to administer Google Workspaces. I find myself using Advanced-GAM and BetterCloud far too often.

I'm trying to talk my boss into dumping Gmail and switching to Outlook. It's such a waste running 365 and Google.

I've specifically been using Azure as my "source of truth" because I think it's more likely we'll dump Google than we'll ever dump things like on-prem AD or Azure.

>and accountants still tend to prefer Excel over sheets (in my experience).

And it isn't because they didn't try Sheets. Lol. Nobody I know likes Google Sheets.

They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.

It's awful.

Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does and you need to manually paint rows, manually find the hidden filter creation option for cells and manually refresh the table because the fitlers are kludged such that they don't automatically re-filter when you edit a row.

Even Mail Merging is awful. https://developers.google.com/apps-script/samples/automation...

Like, you don't need a programming degree to mail merge in Office but you do for Google Sheets because it's a script instead of built-in feature.

I love Google Docs and Sheets and hate Word and Excel.

You're probably in the tech field so you're not a good measure of the average white collar office worker.

> They basically copied the UX of Office 2003 and did nothing to improve upon it since it's initial release over a decade ago.

> It's awful.

On the contrary, sounds marvellous.

> Shit, it still doesn't have the concept of tables like Excel does

Sounds utterly weird. Spreadsheets already are tables, so WTF is the use of a “separate concept of tables” within your tables? Seems to be geared towards creating confusion.

(Or are you just taking about some newfangled moniker for named ranges?)

Laptops are desktops.

In regards to ChromeOS, it hardly matters outside the US school system and Googleplex.

For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage and since I code for a living having things locally is a must for me.

It makes 100% sense in Schools and other places where you want to be able to reset the OS constantly and stop people from breaking it. I think for facebook machine's it would do well too but again I think alot of people will want to have local storage.

> For me, one of the things that has stopped me from even trying ChromeOS is that is/meant to be 100% cloud which means no local storage

I've had a Pixelbook for 4.5 years -- a Google product, so arguably as it's "meant to be" -- and it has 128GB of local storage, and I believe you can get them with up to 512GB. Coding locally using Linux VMs/containers is actually pretty pleasant IME (albeit I don't do frontend work).

Chrome OS deals decently with local file. This is the same way Chrome deals with local stuff anywhere else.

I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.

That said, it's still limited a lot by Google not going the full length and having half baked support for a lot of things. Access to the bluetooth stack is pretty random for android apps for instance. Then Chromebooks are mostly low power machines, so the linux substack only helps that much.

Tablet mode support is too weak to take full advantage of the different form factors. ChromeOS isn't configurable enough to alternative keyboard configs, system wide shortcuts etc.

All in all, it has so much promises, only half delivered. But the half we have now is still pretty decent IMHO.

>I think people underestimate what ChromeOS can do by a lot. There's the android subsytem coming with it, along with an optional linux subsystem, so all in all it covers a lot of ground.

First impressions are everything.

ChromeOS's first impression was that it's Chrome in OS form with no local compute whatsoever; everything is done via the internet, aka the cloud.

That is not strictly the case anymore, but changing first impressions simply is not trivial.

Higher end Chromebooks also rival low- to middle-tier Windows laptops in price, and if you're paying top dollar why not buy the latter and have access to the much more capable Windows ecosystem instead?

Android and Crostini are only on some flagship devices.

And even in those, the lilliput SSD sizes make them hardly workable versus w regular laptop for the same price range.

That's not accurate, my device a Lenovo Chromebook S345 supports linux containers & android apps and is absolutely not a flagship. You'd struggle to run windows on a similarly priced laptop (cost me £150 a year ago).

It definitely is for the random devices being sold on German stores, usually with repeated discounts until finally someone takes them away.

Most of the time it is not possible to enable it.

On the SSD size, it's often the RAM that's really limiting for the linux subsystem. It's the same issue as on cheap windows laptops, only a tad better as ChromeOS is more frugal and orchestrates resources more aggressively.

Most cheap Windows devices come with 512GB.

Chrome being frugal, that is interesting. Maybe Electron devs could take some tips from ChromeOS.

Chrome OS devices have local storage. Premium ones (which are not even that expensive, in the $500+ price tier) have a 256GB SSD for local storage. This at least has not been my issue with Chrome OS.

For that price I rather pay for a proper OS, with at least a 512SSD and hardware not constrained to Web API capabilities.

Desktop = Laptop

God, I wish that were true.

Ask me how many times I've effed up the battery and sleep configuration upgrading Linux on a desktop vs a laptop.

Relative to desktops, laptops tend to be quirky little things because the heavy constraints of form factor, power, and weight result in engineering trade-offs and outright hacks that aren't necessary in the desktop ecosystem.

Okay. You’ve immediately alienated all but the smallest minority of users to draw a distinction that most people just flat out don’t experience.

It's not invalid though. Those are the reasons I stopped trying to use Linux on a laptop.

Linux is not relevant to the discussion.

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