God, why are the choices so bad.
I wouldn't trust Google with anything important these days. But Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive is so bad.
I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit.
I wouldn't trust Google with anything important these days. But Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive is so bad.
I don't think that selfhosting is a great option for corporate, but Microsoft and Google are just shit.
I've seen a couple reasons:
One, often these products are made by companies where the products are not their primary revenue source. The products are often managed as independent business cases. That means they have a budget, timelines, expected revenue figures/costs. It's common for a product to get a low level of investment that only meets the needs of adding new features [to meet sales figures] without ensuring quality. If it were a startup flush with VC money, they could invest all they have into the product, but at an enterprise, it's often the opposite.
Two, often these products are actually acquisitions of startups. You may not know this, but startups tend to churn out some horrifying, janky code just to get themselves off the ground. Buying one of these often leaves you with a huge mess on your hands. Combine that with a lack of investment or cost-cutting, or some of the lead product people leaving, and the product gets worse. Then try to integrate different products, and you're really integrating different messes.
Three, it's genuinely hard to create groupware products that are both high-quality and useful. They're often complex and need to interoperate with one another, yet are built by separate teams. And because they're complex, they each suffer from the standard problems that happen to software products (many books written about them). But the people managing and creating them fall into the same old pitfalls, because software product development is not required to avoid them. Bad management and bad engineering are common, and these products in particular are no exception.
Four, they're actually difficult things to build and sell. If they were easy, there'd be more competition. There tends to be "alternatives", but not with the same features.
Build the ability for integrations (with customer-visible audit logs), inter-user sharing, and proper permissions and you have the modern equivalent of the shared drive from the old days.
And don’t worry about quoting XKCD #927 at me. I know the realities of a project like this.
Why? When corporations weren't capable of managing credit cards securely, PCI was created and all the lazy businesses were told to either do this correctly, or outsource it to someone who will.
When corporations weren't capable of managing infrastructure, Cloud providers created an out and told all the lazy businesses that they could do this correctly. Businesses believed the hype, fired their on-prem administrators, and still can't do this thing correctly.
So, if you can't be bothered to do something correctly, and you can't pay to get it done correctly, maybe you are not fit to be operating.
> and you can't pay to get it done correctly
Am I reading this right? You're blaming the business that is purchasing a service, for the provider's inability to provide it?
The amount spent on Microsoft suggests a willingness to blow money on the problem.
But with Google having no real support, always shutting down projects, and now losing a lot of people's Drive data and refusing to acknowledge it makes me reluctant to use them.
Teams is janky in other ways, such as Microsoft forcing Sharepoint everywhere, and now we have a chat program that attempts to silo data as much as possible so we a lot of project documentation that isn't always accessible or discoverable.
If you have alternative suggestions, I am open to them.
I wonder if with all this antitrust stuff going on we'll ever see regulation in the form of required interoperability and/or data portability? Instead of trying to break up companies, block mergers, etc, I feel like simple technical solutions would be faster and more effective.