I think google are in the enshittification phase of their corporate development and are currently in a cycle of making 0.1% more revenue on search changes at the expense of making it 5% shittier for users each time.
And then they just didn't? They just gave up, only small companies use google workspace these days and excel is as entrenched as ever.
I suppose the google meet/google talk/google hangouts explains a lot of why this hypothetical future didn't happen. If google had a serious person in the helm doing long-term strategy microsoft would already be dead and buried (or worse IBM-fied). Instead the CEOs stock market min-maxers took over.
But yeah, Google had no long term strategy, or ever gave any impression of a road map.
If they had bought a video-call company instead of doing inhouse with google meet they would probably have monopoly on that too.
There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option, since the majority of the workforce was already trained on Office products, and everyone is using an edge feature that a new competing product might be missing.
The teenagers at the time (me included) were all using google sheets and google docs instead of MS products for _years_ before being introduced to the workforce. So the "trained on Office" argument was just an obstacle, not a breaking point if they kept at it for years.
> There is no way a competitor could sustainably price a competing product against a low monthly or annual cost Excel/Office/OneDrive SAAS option
If google had taken on microsoft heads-on they could have sued them into oblivion for anti-competitive practices in pricing if they tried that.
No, they just decided to not execute on the strategy, they did start but didn't finish. Arguably it was to focus on mobile and Android, but I see no reason why google couldn't do both considering all the wasted products they had over the years.
And if anyone could sustain an office suite until it runs profitably in these circumstances, it must surely be Google...
But the problem for competitors is say you are able to make a product just as good as Excel. You start selling it $x, but Microsoft can almost always go down to $x-1 since their marginal cost is near zero.
Maybe Google or some other big company has the cash flow to plow money into subsidizing this bet for many years, I can understand not wanting to make that bet.
Google Docs and whatnot came out all the way back in the late 2000s, but it still didn’t see any measurable adoption by the time office 365 was out. Maybe it is because Google didn’t stick with it and develop it, but I still think it was a long shot.
It didn't stick because google did not pursue the strategy to take over enterprise. Google Docs by itself is not going to displace Office 365 and IT management tools, you need the whole suite of products.
From my (limited) experience google workspace doesn't really offer the level of control over employee computers that microsoft solutions do (like limiting what you can install or tuning settings). So it is a non-starter for any big company.
Amazon is the second largest employer in the US.
https://www.enclyne.com/3-reasons-why-companies-are-migratin...