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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

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.

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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?)

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