Out of interest, who's managing your mail, accounts, purchasing and computer setup now?
As far as computer purchasing, my latest employer had my computer shipped directly from Apple. Once I got it, I installed the mandated MDM software.
You still need a geek or geek adjacent person. Their stuff breaks all the time in weird and wonderful ways and someone local has to figure that out and send trouble tickets in to the vendor(s).
With Google, you pretty much can't get support, even if you are a paying customer, so you absolutely have to have your own human, if only to tell you: You can't use Google that way...
With MS you can get support, but you pay extra for it, and it's hit and miss as to how useful it is.
With Apple, you get support. It's generally pretty good, but can occasionally fail.
It’s the same with O365.
because the CEO/founder's card has a limit.
we had this ~10 years ago where I was also the aforementioned IT guy for on-offboarding, doing whatever needs to be done for marketing, to set one more TXT record, to add one more email alias, to host one more PDF file, and so on.
because this is typical when you are at the size that you have a lot of SaaS subscriptions and you need to manage them, but still way too small to have institutional muscle memory (with semi-dedicated long-hauler folks, proper enterprise accounts with good separation of concerns/controls).
A lot of the HR stuff ironically can also be handled by a PEO for small businesses.
While your employer as far as hiring, firing, internal management is your actual company. As far as health benefits and payroll taxes you are “co employed” by the PEO
IME not a big difference vs 99% of the failures of business IT systems in general...
When evaluating options, I’ve learned to ask myself the question, ”how do I fix this if it breaks?” If my answer is, ”it won’t ever break”, I’ve learned it’s always a red flag that says I don’t understand enough about that solution to support it, because everything can (and will) break.
Or flip it around. Your marketing is using Mailgun, and they just ran an expensive marketing campaign, but none of the emails are going out.
Or the marketing person says Mailgun sucks so they just send mass marketing emails from their work email and now your domain is on a blacklist.
An employee gets phished and their email sends out spam to all your vendors. Your main supplier blocks your domain until their IT can talk to your IT to confirm your IT has fixed the issue. ”we reset their password” isn’t going to cut it.
Your cybersecurity insurance renewal requires 2FA and geoblocking login attempts. Your office manager thinks they maybe figured it out, but now no one in your organization can login.
At the very least you need someone on retainer you can call. The cheapest option, if you can find one, is finding an IT consulting company that works on a time & materials basis. That way you aren’t paying continually but you’re not dead in the water when something breaks.
If you have a company on O365 and don’t ever need IT support, you either have a very very small company or are living the dream surrounded by unicorns.
Something is broken at least every day or two and I’m on a full MS stack. Hopefully we manage to dump Teams in the near future and this’ll hopefully get significantly better. Teams is the bulk of the issues.
What has broken about using any of o365?
"I can't save outside of onedrive"
"My mails aren't getting delivered"
"My office suite has deactivated itself and won't reactivate"
"We need a shared mailbox for x,y,z"
"The new joiner can't access my onedrive/shared drive" (No groups/auto-groups - they require some more advanced administration or discipline).
"I received an email from someone impersonating the CEO asking for an invoice to be paid immediately"
"My Excel sheet is somehow not syncing to onedrive and now there's conflicts"
FD: We don't use Teams, and we migrated from o365 to GSuite, but there are some people who remain on o365 for Office reasons.
And Teams. Everything. My personal favourite is document format screw ups (‘corruption’ might be the right word) depending on which Word was used (app, browser, Teams Word). It’s such a shit product. Document footer problems and page numbering issues are a complete waste of my time.
Spending the first 10 minutes of every call trying to get sound working for everyone. Hey Teams, don’t switch what mic you are using.
Excel has some funk around keeping shared files in sync. We set up one spreadsheet where I have read only access so I don’t accidentally delete anything. Turns out when I do make a change, excel creates a locally cached version and stops syncing changes. That took a couple hours of screwing around to figure out, and the solution was to duplicate the spreadsheet with a new name and delete the old one.
Last year we had Mac users start to report "when I attach a file, it looks like it's sent, but then recipient never sees it, and sent-emails doesn't show it either!" It got worse and worse.
This is kind of a problem in a business that sends and reviews a lot of documents. I spent two months on countless calls with MS, repeatedly capturing videos they requested, etc.
Finally, I happened to come across an advisory that hey, Outlook for Mac is broken, and will "eat" attachments. Dated a week before we started to see the problem. Firstly, it took them MONTHS to get it resolved as it required significant updates to Exchange. Secondly, in all the interactions I had to have with their support team: they had NO IDEA. Worse than useless.
Users being stupid, using and holding it wrong, etc.
Just because you haven't had any bad experiences with Google, MS, Apple, etc doesn't mean it's a rosy world where everything works all the time.
As far as network/connectivity, how is that a Google problem if your office can’t connect to the internet?
In my experience Cloud provider reliability is about the same as self-hosting. They claim to have super reliable uptime, and it's hard to see history, but they regularly have small outages in various regions, areas, etc.
In real world anecdata I've had our Google stuff stop working more often than some of my stuff, though my stuff is very stable and never changes, except relevant security updates, so it's not entirely a fair comparison. Also our stuff is running on over-sized hardware and can handle 2 node outages without issue. Since the hardware this stuff uses is on a 4hr support contract, it's very, very rare that even one node goes down for more than a day. Of course we pay a lot for that stability, on purpose.
I agree IF you use Chrome, then Google's browser compatibility issues are near zero. Not everyone uses Chrome.
It's not a Google problem, but it is still a USER problem someone has to manage and handle.
Clearly you have never done much if any end-user support.
It was fortunate that we were paying for the level where there was a separate way for discovery lawyers to suck out all your files, as that was the only way I found to get them back.
The other issue with gsuite is the file ownership model means that by default files are owned by an individual and can end up being lost after they leave. Transferring ownership is some kind of weird batch job that can fail and need to be retried.
Microsoft’s assumption is that businesses are using 365, and so both the number of features and the various paths to trouble tend reflect that.
To the random business owner, dropping them into anything other than Microsoft Admin Center is akin to dropping a tier one helpdesk agent into the AWS Management Console with no guidance. The trick is once you’re beyond a handful of employees you typically need to work beyond the MS Admin Center. If you want to do anything remotely sophisticated with identities, deploy SSO, etc, you need to be working from the Azure or (duplicative) Entra portals. If you want to do something like route helpdesk email, you need to be in the Exchange Admin Center. Tweaking spam filters is in yet another portal (currently Security Center, although that has changed a few times). And so on. Not to mention the more esoteric features that are only available behind Graph API calls.
I used to administer Google Workspace environments too, and while that control panel is MUCH more friendly, it’s still exceedingly easy for a non-technical person following a random walkthrough online to foul up their environment. I’ve watched that happened first hand many times.
At some point your 0.2 becomes 0.3 and eventually crosses a threshold where it just makes sense to dedicate a resource for cost reasons.