Hacker News Reader

Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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 :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com