5 ms·

Google makes an aggressive move to steal Microsoft Office customers

16 points by luu 11y ago

jbob2000 11y ago
Pfft, good luck. My 65 year old mother nearly died from stress overload when Office 2007 was released. Good fucking luck getting her to transfer to Google. It's not free to transfer to Google when you need to retrain your entire workforce on it. Microsoft has it good with Office; they have an entire generation of Luddites dependent on them.
- ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  The biggest problem with SaaS for seniors is that they expect the buttons to not move. Anything with continuous deployment like Google anything, basically sucks for seniors. I get a call from an old lady every time the AOL website moves a button, for serious.
  - jbob2000 11y ago
    It's not even about things moving. Some are completely unable to reason about interfaces. I had this conversation with my mother recently: Her: "There's an error on my screen, what do I do?" Me: "What does the error say?" Her: "The file name you entered is too long. What do I do?" Me: "Make the file name shorter" Her: "It worked!" facepalm
  - irremediable 11y ago
    I feel like this is as often the fault of the designers as the user, though. Of course it's going to confuse people if you change the design; and often, such changes are arbitrary and unnecessary.
    - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      The key point is that if you own software on your PC, it doesn't change at all. It only changes when the user allows an update to occur. Web software changes spontaneously and breaks your workflow on a regular basis. Seniors' understanding of how computers work is rarely flexible enough to adapt to this.
- richmarr 11y ago
  Yeah, same. My Nan looked at me in horror when I suggested giving up Sharepoint; she said it reminded her of Terence (her old cat, RIP)... and she thought I was joking when I suggested trying Slack. "But that's just Yammer" she told me when I described it. "Microsoft have got all the things I need, I don't need to use Dougal like you kids, besides, I like that Satya Nadella, he's such a nice boy" My respect goes to the guy who manages to sell these Microsoft Enterprise Agreements to the elderly. That's some hussle.
BostonEnginerd 11y ago
Watch out with Google Apps - I transferred my domain's email over to Google Apps. Now that I've moved my email out, apparently I need to continue paying for the service otherwise I lose my Google Play library.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rebootthesystem 11y ago
Wow, that's a tough one on many fronts. As someone mentioned, the change in UI when Office 2007 came out was more painful than most care to admit. I personally went from feeling like a power user to a complete moron crying like a little baby. Horrible move on Microsoft's part. Not sure we've gained anything at all. But, now years later, it is what it is. Then there's "Office as a Tool", which, to me, means mostly Excel. Another big huge part of the MS ecosystem, at least for us, is the fact that you can automate and create custom solutions using VBA (or Python). I don't have any data to indicate this is commonplace but I'd like to think large companies have such things as highly customize Excel spreadsheets doing all kinds of interesting stuff. As an example, we developed an Excel application to design Helmholtz resonators for acoustic treatment of mixing rooms and high-end movie projection rooms. It would calculate various room resonant modes, use a database of materials to determine damping across the desired frequency ranges and spit out Helmholtz resonator build parameters for low to mid-range acoustical treatment. It worked like a charm and could be installed and loaded by anyone with Excel. Yet another tool was used to simulate FIFO timing for a frame buffer to be implemented within a Xilinx FPGA for an image processing application. It would allow faster verification of various parameters than running a Verilog simulation and spit out a bunch of Verilog code based on results. Another tool was a really neat state machine generator for embedded systems using multi-line text LCD displays for a menu. You could build the menu in Excel, click a few buttons and out would come a full state machine with callback function definitions for full navigation through a menu as well as dealing with screens where user adjustments could happen (think "volume up", "volume down", "set temperature", etc.). If you've ever written and maintained LCD menu code for an embedded system you can appreciate the advantage of entering your menu into Excel and having cut-and-paste C code you can paste into your Keil compiler (or whatever). Another tool was created to help design Power Distribution Systems (PDS) for high speed boards. In designing electronic boards operating at high frequencies PDS integrity is a big deal. We wrote an Excel tool that encoded all of the required knowledge (for our work) and allowed the engineer to explore various PDS integrity topologies and configurations with graphs, etc. A tool I really like helped with the time consuming task of creating land and schematic patterns for Altium Designer. Rolling-up to your desk to create schematic symbols and a pcb pattern for an FPGA with 1152 pins is, well, a nightmare. And it is worst as a design is modified during development stages. Our tool was able to take a process that consumed 10 to 12 hours and shrink it down to 30 to 45 minutes. We created a Powerpoint presentation that made heavy use of VBA to simulate a full control panel, complete with a dot matrix LCD display. This tool was used to both demonstrate functionality and train people on the system without much more than a laptop running powerpoint. I have a lot more examples like that. The point being that, in the right hands, these Office tools are far more useful and capable than out of the box. And then there's the financial side. Google tools cost money. We upgraded our Office 2003 licenses to Office 2007 and we've been using that version ever since. There's nothing in the new versions that is compelling enough to upgrade. This means that the cost of Office becomes insignificant and non-recurring, which can be very important. Note to Microsoft: Want to get me (and others) to upgrade again? Make Python a NATIVE alternative to VBA.
sudo-i 11y ago
Is Google scanning/reading emails as to do advertising with Enterprise customers? If so, I'd imagine a lot of companies have qualms with that practice.

16 points by luu 11y ago

jbob2000 11y ago

Pfft, good luck. My 65 year old mother nearly died from stress overload when Office 2007 was released. Good fucking luck getting her to transfer to Google. It's not free to transfer to Google when you need to retrain your entire workforce on it. Microsoft has it good with Office; they have an entire generation of Luddites dependent on them.

ocdtrekkie 11y ago
The biggest problem with SaaS for seniors is that they expect the buttons to not move. Anything with continuous deployment like Google anything, basically sucks for seniors. I get a call from an old lady every time the AOL website moves a button, for serious.
- jbob2000 11y ago
  It's not even about things moving. Some are completely unable to reason about interfaces. I had this conversation with my mother recently: Her: "There's an error on my screen, what do I do?" Me: "What does the error say?" Her: "The file name you entered is too long. What do I do?" Me: "Make the file name shorter" Her: "It worked!" facepalm
- irremediable 11y ago
  I feel like this is as often the fault of the designers as the user, though. Of course it's going to confuse people if you change the design; and often, such changes are arbitrary and unnecessary.
  - ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    The key point is that if you own software on your PC, it doesn't change at all. It only changes when the user allows an update to occur. Web software changes spontaneously and breaks your workflow on a regular basis. Seniors' understanding of how computers work is rarely flexible enough to adapt to this.
richmarr 11y ago
Yeah, same. My Nan looked at me in horror when I suggested giving up Sharepoint; she said it reminded her of Terence (her old cat, RIP)... and she thought I was joking when I suggested trying Slack. "But that's just Yammer" she told me when I described it. "Microsoft have got all the things I need, I don't need to use Dougal like you kids, besides, I like that Satya Nadella, he's such a nice boy" My respect goes to the guy who manages to sell these Microsoft Enterprise Agreements to the elderly. That's some hussle.

BostonEnginerd 11y ago

Watch out with Google Apps - I transferred my domain's email over to Google Apps. Now that I've moved my email out, apparently I need to continue paying for the service otherwise I lose my Google Play library.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rebootthesystem 11y ago

Wow, that's a tough one on many fronts. As someone mentioned, the change in UI when Office 2007 came out was more painful than most care to admit. I personally went from feeling like a power user to a complete moron crying like a little baby. Horrible move on Microsoft's part. Not sure we've gained anything at all. But, now years later, it is what it is. Then there's "Office as a Tool", which, to me, means mostly Excel. Another big huge part of the MS ecosystem, at least for us, is the fact that you can automate and create custom solutions using VBA (or Python). I don't have any data to indicate this is commonplace but I'd like to think large companies have such things as highly customize Excel spreadsheets doing all kinds of interesting stuff. As an example, we developed an Excel application to design Helmholtz resonators for acoustic treatment of mixing rooms and high-end movie projection rooms. It would calculate various room resonant modes, use a database of materials to determine damping across the desired frequency ranges and spit out Helmholtz resonator build parameters for low to mid-range acoustical treatment. It worked like a charm and could be installed and loaded by anyone with Excel. Yet another tool was used to simulate FIFO timing for a frame buffer to be implemented within a Xilinx FPGA for an image processing application. It would allow faster verification of various parameters than running a Verilog simulation and spit out a bunch of Verilog code based on results. Another tool was a really neat state machine generator for embedded systems using multi-line text LCD displays for a menu. You could build the menu in Excel, click a few buttons and out would come a full state machine with callback function definitions for full navigation through a menu as well as dealing with screens where user adjustments could happen (think "volume up", "volume down", "set temperature", etc.). If you've ever written and maintained LCD menu code for an embedded system you can appreciate the advantage of entering your menu into Excel and having cut-and-paste C code you can paste into your Keil compiler (or whatever). Another tool was created to help design Power Distribution Systems (PDS) for high speed boards. In designing electronic boards operating at high frequencies PDS integrity is a big deal. We wrote an Excel tool that encoded all of the required knowledge (for our work) and allowed the engineer to explore various PDS integrity topologies and configurations with graphs, etc. A tool I really like helped with the time consuming task of creating land and schematic patterns for Altium Designer. Rolling-up to your desk to create schematic symbols and a pcb pattern for an FPGA with 1152 pins is, well, a nightmare. And it is worst as a design is modified during development stages. Our tool was able to take a process that consumed 10 to 12 hours and shrink it down to 30 to 45 minutes. We created a Powerpoint presentation that made heavy use of VBA to simulate a full control panel, complete with a dot matrix LCD display. This tool was used to both demonstrate functionality and train people on the system without much more than a laptop running powerpoint. I have a lot more examples like that. The point being that, in the right hands, these Office tools are far more useful and capable than out of the box. And then there's the financial side. Google tools cost money. We upgraded our Office 2003 licenses to Office 2007 and we've been using that version ever since. There's nothing in the new versions that is compelling enough to upgrade. This means that the cost of Office becomes insignificant and non-recurring, which can be very important. Note to Microsoft: Want to get me (and others) to upgrade again? Make Python a NATIVE alternative to VBA.

sudo-i 11y ago

Is Google scanning/reading emails as to do advertising with Enterprise customers? If so, I'd imagine a lot of companies have qualms with that practice.