Microsoft Office is killing Google Apps and anemic iWorks | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Office is killing Google Apps and anemic iWorks

blogs.computerworld.com

45 pointspgralla47 comments

Linkbait. This is a highly opinionated piece with an exaggerated title, short on data and long on unjustified hyperbole. Microsoft Office isn't "killing" anything. Both Office 365 and Google Apps are great products, and both are winning large enterprise contracts when pitted against the other -- for example, Google Apps just won a deal for 68,000 employees at Whirlpool, beating Microsoft Office.[1]

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/google-lands-whirlpool-for-go...

Thank you for this. I got the weirdest feeling from some of the responses below that HN is being astroturfed.

I'm not a Microsoft hater, but it's being laid on a little thick.

> "Linkbait."

You are being very generous. OP is obviously either a PR hit piece paid for in full by microsoft, or indistinguishable from one.

Office 365 is the fastest growing Microsoft product ever. Microsoft has earned ridicule in terms of Windows 8 and Windows Phone but to me they are doing all the right things in this space.

They should have launched Android and iOS support a year ago but I suspect that hole is going to be shut soon. I suspect Apple knows that too, and hence is offering their less valuable product for free.

Just think how amazing Skype is going to be when its the primary way you communicate in real time with the rest of the folks in your enterprise (I know most of you aren't enterprise folks but if you are you get just how valuable this is when 99% of the people you need to work with are in another building or another part of the world). I have no doubt that is coming.

Not sure what you mean by the Skype thing - as far as I know, Skype is already released.

Obviously Skype is released but not well integrated with the rest of Microsoft's suite. It can be far far more and better integrated than it is right now.

Please no.

If that would kill Skype in Linux, it would cut me off my colleagues who use it in Windows.

I don't think its an either/or situation. You might have less integration but not less than you have today.

Skype has been progressively getting worse and worse with each recent release anyway. I had to have my mom figure out Google Hangout recently to video chat with her grandson as Skype has become totally unusable for video on my devices. With every release, more stuff that used to work starts failing.

Lync is the primary way to communicate in the large corporation I work for today. It replaced my desk phone. I would never want to go back to a traditional physical phone.

Exactly. Now think of combining that "within your organization reach of Lync" with Skype's outside your organization reach into one product.

I'll pile on here. Lync's fantastic. Seamless integration, multi-device. Has phone support that's just plug-n-play (over USB). Proper presence info that just works. The tie-ins with Outlook/OWA/Exchange for voicemail and such is also really slick.

Slick and easy call management (forward, sent to group, VM), easy IM, group IM, easy escalation to screen sharing or voice and video conferencing. All of this is secured by your own TLS certs. IM history goes into Outlook, one simple place for all forms of communication from SMS to missed calls, voicemails, IMs and emails.

Edit: Oh, also, easy federated IM. We can now have customers federate via O365 and IM us directly. There are blocking tools in place to prevent abuse. But it's far better than having to list a Skype/GTalk/AIM/MSN ID.

I'd love to know of a non-enterprise competitor in this space (like why go to Cisco over MS?). Pretty much everything I've seen is not remotely on the same level. For example, they'll plaster a "Dial" toolbar by rendering on top of some other part of the Outlook UI, and then call that integrated dialing. Or you'll have to use a web UI somewhere and login to a phone just to change your call forwarding settings.

No particular pieces are terribly hard by themselves, but it's a massive amount of work to get it all really polished up and have it just work so wonderfully. Without the centerpoint of Exchange/Outlook, I think a Lync competitor has a pretty big uphill battle.

You are spot on. Exchange Online is $4 per month per user for 25 GB mailboxes. Office 365 is $6 per month per user.

They also pay commissions to Microsoft Partners each and every month. I work full time at an investment bank but I've helped several local companies (about 500 seats) to move from on-premises Exchange to Office 365. It's a ridiculous no-brainer for them. Most of them paid more in annual maintenance for their spam firewall than Office 365 charges them.

There were some growing pains as they moved from Microsoft BPOS to Office 365 but it works tremendously well now and all the early kinks have been ironed out as far as I can see.

Oh, and outlook.com is completely free and works with user domains.

> Microsoft's biggest competitor for office suites is Google Apps,

Disagree. I'm a spreadsheet-fan and Numbers (mac version of Excel) is waaay better than Google Doc's spreadsheet. In fact, Numbers rivals Excel in many ways. For those who haven't used it, Numbers is more of a container that holds all kinds of objects, like media files, text fields, and including spreadsheets. This model, I've found, is way more effective at communicating concepts that require textual descriptions alongside small blocks of spreadsheets.

> Numbers rivals Excel in many ways

The only use case Numbers performs well is as spreadsheet presentation software with the ability to edit. If you need to work with a lot of data or crunch a lot of numbers, it's not even close. Excel wins.

Agreed. Google apps are no where near Microsoft's suite in terms of maturity and capability - not just Excel. This article assumes that Google apps was once at a point on-par with Microsoft office when it never was.

It seems to me that this is a situation similar to the one Dropbox found itself in when starting out - the key obstacle for getting a file hosting service to take off was universal device compatibility, and they spent a ton of time on it and nailed it.

For any startup or other competitors to Office, the one key feature they must get right is document compatibility. I know Microsoft doesn't play fair in that regard, but I'm sure a motivated enough team could crack it.

Office is actually decent for being MS software, but a simplified and streamlined web experience, reduced feature bloat, with online collaborative tools, and made available free or cheap could steal a lot of market share.

> a simplified and streamlined web experience, reduced feature bloat, with online collaborative tools, and made available free or cheap could steal a lot of market share.

Microsoft has this solution: https://skydrive.live.com

SkyDrive and the associated Office "lite" apps are free and feature light versions of the Office suite products. For business there is the Office365 apps which are the logical progression.

Also, the desktop versions of the Office apps integrate with these cloud based services.

For larger companies, there are also options to run in a private cloud and/or behind the firewall.

As a lawyer, the only option is Office. I've tried Docs and it's terrible. Libreoffice had problems with ordered lists.

Office is far and away better than anything else out there in ease of use and professional look.

This thread is thick with dubious possible-astroturfing. Please, people, when you're writing about commercialized products, try not to sound like their PR team - you lose credibility even if you are genuine users.

How do you suggest writing about a product that has turned out really fantastic for your org? A product that appears to be far ahead of the competition? I give my sincere opinion on Lync (although I didn't mention that it's a real pain to configure for on-premise deploy) - after 9 years in telecom, here's something that works like it should.

Phrases like "the competition" set off my buzzword detector.

I'm not ever thinking about 'the competition' of the products I'm using, I'm thinking of other ways to solve the same problem.

I dunno, just try to stick to more descriptive terms - "It's worked really well for us compared to the other telephony systems we've used", vs "it's far ahead of the competition"? I'm not a writer by trade.

Lol, I personally would have preferred he wrote it in Shakespearian "tith functioning supercedith thus of thyne competitors"

Out of curiosity, where does HN stand on Office suites? I use iWork for most of my work, but if I need to work on something quickly on any computer I use Google. What do the rest of you use? Does anyone prefer Office?

I don't use office suites much in my work but I usually work on long documents in Pages + presentations in Keynote. Shorter documents and spreadsheets I do on Google.

if i'm not using latex (MS word replacement), i'm using office.

Google's Spreadsheets are nice for collaborative work, but i'm not just impressed with word/presentation/drawing/etc.

I actually do a lot of drawing with MS PowerPoint (figures for papers/presentations/hw/recitations/etc), and love OneNote + Skydrive syncing (just so easy to organize, add different media, and access). If i did more with spreadsheets (as opposed to just loading batches of numbers into Matlab), i might do more with Google Docs....but i don't see that happening anytime soon.

I use google docs, and feel like everyone I know professionally in the sfbay tech world does too.

That's because you are in the startup ecosystem (I'm guessing - which is totally valid) - it is a totally different story once you are talking Enterprise and everything that comes with it (Sarbanes Oxley etc.).

It will also be interesting to see how this shifts now that Google is charging everyone to use Google Apps from the get go.

I do get the feeling that this is mostly because it's free however: The UI and feature set are pretty poor, especially compared to office.

I sometimes get the impression that the product has just a little bit too much "techdemo" feel.

- sure you can collaboratively edit, but not very well: edits to the top of the document will cause repages that make any other editors editing the bottom seesick. There isn't really a good track-changes implementation either - not something you could use to discuss whether changes are good.

- You can do some styling, but again it comes across as not really practical for continual extensive use. Word doesn't do a brilliant job of keeping themes/styles consistent throughout the document, but google docs doesn't even try. Just using a different font consistently requires vigilance - there's no defaults you can change. Also, the styling features are really limited in the first place.

- Practical tools for writing are sparse. You'd think with their unrivalled big-data text analysis capabilities gdocs would have best-of-the-best spelling/grammar checkers, but they're just basic. The editor view enforces a paged layout, even if you're not writing pages (and when you are, it's not necessarily good for productivity to have it so in your face the whole time). It's html-based, but html export is rudimentary, and css support essentially absent.

Frankly, I don't think Gdocs has limited takeup due to poor document interop, I think it has poor takeup because it's just not a very good rich text editor. And it's crucial selling points - always online, cheap, hassle-free synchronization - just aren't that unique anymore, nor executed all that well.

I don't care that it's free - I'd happily pay for a good office suite. But it'd need to run on Linux and OS X. And it'd need to be available remotely. And support collaborative edits.

Unlike you I've never run into problems with the collaborative editing. The relative lack of features is not a hindrance for me either, and in some way it's a benefit - less UI clutter.

It does certainly lack features, though, and things like the spreadsheet suffers from performance problems (a spreadsheet with more than a couple of hundred rows is total agony), but for me it's still meeting more requirements than Office.

There are people who say that they have to do some things that can only be done by Excel, or Word, or whatever. There are other people who say that some office suite is what everyone else is using and they can't cope with the constant demands for compatibility help if they use something else.

I love Abiword, and Gnumeric, and LibreOffice. I recognise that general people hate computers and can't understand them, and they want something very familiar. One of the (many) things I'd do if I had the money is create excellent quality documentation for these projects, in a variety of formats, and pay for them to hire researchers / designers.

EDIT: I'm not comfortable using Google products. Partly for the privacy stuff, but mostly because of the online need.

LibreOffice. I can download it and install it faster than Microsoft Office, even if the Office disc is in the drive. (I use Office stuff rarely enough where that actually matters.)

Plus, LibreOffice is kind of the only option on Linux.

I don't use my Mac for anything serious outside of XCode.

LibreOffice and Kingsoft are the two alternatives I'm running right now.

So far I have sent .doc files to my boss without issues.

LibreOffice is goddamn awful. They should just scrap the whole thing and start over, because I have never not been screwed by LibreOffice.

Make a presentation within L.O., save it to the native L.O. format, then when I open it again later, things have moved and fonts are different.

Any form the company sends me will be displayed incorrectly. Maybe fields won't be fillable, or only some of the checkboxes will check. Maybe the 2 page form will magically spread to 3 pages. Maybe it won't print at all.

I have done all three in the past three years and honestly prefer Office. Powerpoint is just a hundred times better than Keynote and Presently (Google Apps). Probably the only thing I'd like to have is a "Office for Dummies" mode that turns off all the complicated bits of the suite and just gives me the stuff that 90% of people use.

I don't get the hate against Office. It works fine. It's ridiculously easy to make things that look business-y. I don't need much more.

OpenOffice failed me on the compatibility front every time I tried it. Google Docs are terribly slow, and I find the general UX unfriendly.

I prefer Office. Libre/Open Office compatibility always fails me in some strange way and they've still got certain settings buried deep in strange locations. Google Apps are okay in a pinch and I don't mind using them for smaller documents, but they also don't play 100% nicely with Pentadactyl/Vimperator.

I use Microsoft Office 2013. IMHO it's the state of the art.

I use Google Docs and OpenOffice since I switched to Ubuntu for Ruby development.

Also, google docs has been renamed to google drive, even if no one wants to call it google drive.

And the way to download these serious work apps is through Google Play

I just wrote my first proposal in Docs today, as an experiment to see if we can stop emailing Word documents back and forth. Google Docs is missing some very basic features, like page numbers in the table of contents, and the ability to hide the footer and header on the first page.

That said, creating a cover page and table of contents as separate documents and combining the pdfs later still seems like it'll better overall than dealing with Word.

It's "iWork", not "iWorks". It doesn't care what bloggers say about it, as long as they spell its name right ;-)

Google Spreadsheets are adequate for basic spreadsheet use and Docs is good enough for most document processing. Any time you start to lean in toward the complex functionality or dealing with large data sets you are going to wish you had a binary installed on your local machine.

I love me some Word/Excel/PowerPoint (even the much maligned Ribbon), and Google Docs doesn't have anything close to Office's feature set. That said, the ability to edit a document simultaneously in Google Docs is its killer feature. The UX for this feature in Word/Excel (haven't tried PowerPoint yet) is nowhere near as good, in my humble opinion. I find myself doing collaborative composition in Docs and then, when necessary, moving to Word/Excel to finish editing. (Also, it would be nice if I could edit spreadsheets and presentations online in SharePoint.)

My colleagues and I did numerous presentations in National (U.S.) conferences in 2012 and 2013. I’m sure that my team was the only one using Keynote instead of PowerPoint.

Taht being said, we get a lot of questions from the attendees and other presenters about our presentation. Other presenters wanted to know how to make theirs like ours in PowerPoint.

If you believe it, maybe it will happen!

[isn't that called "delusional"?]

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