15 ms·

Microsoft Office 365 beats out Google’s G Suite in S&P 1500

153 points by ah- 10y ago

djrogers 10y ago
Setting aside the accuracy of the data collection here, is it any surprise that companies prefer an enterprise focused product backed by support contracts, SEs, and actual desktop/mobile apps instead of web interfaces? Oh, and one cannot overlook the power of Excel lock-in here - the number of business lines run on excel macros in this country is staggering...
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  Office Professional 2016 is $400. The closest equivalent is Office 365 ProPlus (the other enterprise plans add lots of extra stuff not included in the standalone) which is $12/mo. For an upgrade cycle shorter than 3 years, 365 is cheaper. Even for a longer cycle, the standalone is a significant outlay compared to the monthly cost. So you are comparing a no-risk (since you can always fall back to the native apps) negligible cost solution to the google solution
- gdulli 10y ago
  Yeah, personally I find desktop apps to be much more usable than shoehorning complex functionality into a browser tab, which is always awkward. My current company was on Google apps for about 2 years and then switched to Office for the last 2 years. I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it. I will say the "cloud" evolution of Microsoft Office is annoying. Every time I start a new document it wants to default to saving it to OneDrive and pops up a login window. I just want to work on local files, dammit.
  - knz 10y ago
    > I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it. My employer is trying to roll out O365 to the enterprise. Some of us have been using Google without official IT blessing (due to needing to get shit done in the absence of an official solution) for years. The biggest pain point so far as been moving from Hangouts to Skype for chat. The UI on Skype is awful - multiple pop up's instead of one page (https://hangouts.google.com/ https://hangouts.google.com/), a native client that wants to update way too often vs a website, and for some reason every new conversation with someone starts a new window even if the person already has one open. It's a joke.
    - raesene9 10y ago
      you could always use Microsoft Teams for chat now... (https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat...)
      - knz 10y ago
        That actually looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.
        jyrkesh 10y ago
        Teams even works as a fully-functional (i.e. chat, voice, video, groups) replacement client for Skype for Business. In my opinion, it works much better as a SFB client; hoping it eventually just takes over SFB.
      - hashhar 10y ago
        One of my uncle's companies moved to Teams recently from Zoom (and Hangouts before that) and I once heard quite a lot of praise from him. Can it be used for personal use? Like in peer to peer?
        jermaustin1 10y ago
        The company I work for just got on teams, and it integrates with our organization at the Active Directory level. We can do personal chats, meetings and messages, but only to others INSIDE our organization. It isn't a deal breaker, but firing up a screenshare/meeting to a vendor is impossible through it.
        hashhar 10y ago
        Thanks for the info. I have yet to get into a job (will be starting this summer) so I didn't know much about this stuff but am excited.
    - gdulli 10y ago
  - CPAhem 10y ago
    > I can't say MS is better at everything MS is way better at support, which is a crucial factor in business. Our small company we have found that G Suite had almost non-existent support from Google. Finding a human at Google to talk to, or even reply to a forum post is very difficult.
    - ohstopitu 10y ago
      if you are paying for google apps, it's insanely easy to talk to Google Support[0]. I've contacted Google Support for a lot of issues (some insanely trivial, and some pretty complicated - both via phone and chat and they have yet to disappoint me). MS has always been in the enterprise world and they've honed their skills on it. But imo, G Suite is not too far behind when it comes to support - but it is lacking in other areas - like not having native apps. [0] https://support.google.com/a/?hl=en#topic=29157&contact=1 https://support.google.com/a/?hl=en#topic=29157&contact=1
  - lwkl 10y ago
    I think there is a setting where you can change the default save location to local. I don't know if it disables the popup though.
- joezydeco 10y ago
  Active Directory lock-in is huge as well.
TAForObvReasons 10y ago
TIL S&P 1500 refers to the combination of the the S&P 500, S&P Mid cap (400) and S&P Small cap (600) companies: http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/ http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/
sz4kerto 10y ago
Of course it does. We (@ work) use G Suite and it's good if you use it for simple things, but it's really a toy. People who work a _lot_ with long-ish documents all know that Word is better (because of richer functionality); and people who work with larger spreadsheets know that Excel is better (functionality and performance). It's the typical situation: no user uses more than 5% of Excel's functionality -- but users don't use the same 5%. Where G Suite is great is 3rd party integrations, especially ones targeting small/mid size companies.
- hackcrafter 10y ago
  The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it. O365 took the idea and ran. Yes, their web-based UI isn't as rich, but it has some decent collaboration, really good mobile apps and of course excellent desktop native apps. Google could have held their lead IMHO if they kept building out their Docs/Sheets to be closer to feature-parity with Word/Excel and started earlier on good mobile and desktop native apps (which don't even exist!) I love me some google docs for collaborative editing, but your right in the scaling of large docs in Word and Excel functionality.
  - TAForObvReasons 10y ago
    Google docs has to become office in terms of feature parity faster than office online has to match google docs because the microsoft price point is comparable to the standalone. Microsoft can always push people to use the native word and excel apps for certain features because it's covered in the cost of the 365 sub, but google can't do the same because it's a separate cost.
    - hackcrafter 10y ago
      Yea, I agree. I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company. Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing. Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another. Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.
advisedwang 10y ago
Very curious to see what the delta is next time they run this analysis. The trend is really more indicative of success than a single snapshot, I believe.
- dispose13432 10y ago
  The trend seems to be going to MS also. Remember that Google pioneered the idea.
  - type0 10y ago
    I don't think it's true, although the dates on wikipedia might be wrong and I have no time or interest to look on the sources. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_Suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_S... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides
- us0r 10y ago
  Okta has some more info and a lot of blog posts on it. https://www.okta.com/Businesses-At-Work/2016-03/ https://www.okta.com/Businesses-At-Work/2016-03/
  - RachelF 10y ago
    That's better data than the original link - thanks.
chrisper 10y ago
I am using O365 for my own domain (with only 1 user) and had only great experiences so far. The support is great too!
Apocryphon 10y ago
Just this morning I found myself unable to switch between two Google Drive accounts, because both of them had the same domain, @gmail.com. Signing out of a single account leads to all accounts being signed out. Gmail was launched 12 years ago. Why, Google, why?
- luma 10y ago
  If you're a G suite user you'll find a lot of weird corner-case situations where you simply cannot use various services and features elsewhere in the Google portfolio. Want to setup a family account in G Music? Not supported if your account is G suite. Want to check your calendar with the new Google Home? Can't be done if you are a G Suite user. The list goes on and on. It's the weirdest thing, because you'd think Google would want to cater to their paying customers first.
- CPAhem 10y ago
  The default Google Drive client is pretty basic and limited to one account at a time. Google probably has not prioritized desktop software like Drive. There are third party clients that provide more features like Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com http://syncdocs.com which can sync multiple @gmail accounts to Google Drive. >Why, Google, why? Google probably prefers you to keep one account for targeting advertising, plus each Drive account comes with 15GB free space, so multiple Drive accounts give you more free space.
- amerkhalid 10y ago
  Another issue that drives me nuts with Google Drive is that it crashes Lightroom if I keep LR catalog in Drive folder. I either have to shutdown Drive while working in Lightroom or move catalog out of Drive folder. I don't think I ever had crashes when I kept catalog in Dropbox folder. Once my subscription runs out, I will probably try out OneDrive or go back to Dropbox.
  - therealmarv 10y ago
    That's a problem of their Google Drive Desktop Sync program. I also hated it (it also sucks a lot of CPU). Since switching to Insync for desktop synching all my problems with GDrive are gone. Google should buy this tiny company for their great work with GDrive.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
This isn't too surprising, as a paid G Suite user my 'help' experience was better than that of the free version (at the time) but it was still sub-par to the support Microsoft gave for even small businesses that bought 15 licenses to Office. The killer is that Google still has not cracked the 'support people who don't like to use computers but have to' nut and it is very very hard for them to get there. Until they can get there I don't see them making either serious inroads or serious cash flow from any consumer facing app/device.
bla2 10y ago
Office has been around for over 25 years. Most businesses use it, and 365 is included. So isn't the surprise that G Suite (silly name) shows up anywhere on the same scale at all, with it being a third as old?
nunez 10y ago
You'd be surprised by the number of companies locked into Microsoft products.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  Willingly, because most competition is actually worse.
- hashhar 10y ago
  Well, in the office space they do make better products and support than all of their competitors.
tangue 10y ago
Anecdata : I tried to switch the company to Gsuite by sharing more and more docs using the personal version. It works well until for some reason they changed the way to create a new document, instead of the classical file > new it was a big "+" sign at the bottom of the screen. Nobody could figure it out and even if they switched back to a more classical ui later (or that we were in the wrong sample of an A/B) usage of drive and Google Apps declined.
keeganjw 10y ago
To be fair, by far the most powerful weapon the Spaniards had was disease, not technology. That's what ended up killing millions of Native Americans. So, it's a bit of a weird analogy...
- Melkman 10y ago
  You mean like a virus ? I found it a weird analogy because I couldn't figure out who are supposed to be the Spaniards. Is it Google because they are up against a competitor that is massively entrenched in the office suite market ? Or is it Microsoft because they seem to be expanding their presence.
FussyZeus 10y ago
I pay for O365 but barely use the web apps. Google's losing IMHO because web apps suck, simple as that. Yes every once in awhile I'll fire one of them up because I need to check something and then 30 seconds later I'll remember why I never use them; slow, clunky, unstable. Native apps forever (or until the infrastructure is built out more at least.)
- nu5500 10y ago
  And if you have something like a Surface, the native apps have great inking support. Just open up a Word doc, sign it and send it back. The web apps are nice in a pinch, but I find that they have these (probably intentional) shortcomings that make them fall short of doing real day-to-day work. For example, no format painter in Excel Online. That doesn't make any sense to me and these features should at least be available to paying customers.
  - FussyZeus 10y ago
    I'd imagine it's about half intentional, half limitations of the platform. Doing some of the stuff that Excel does in a browser would be maddening.
Spooky23 10y ago
Microsoft put the hard squeeze on EA customers and just turned their reseller model upside down. Most people are forced into paying for some sort of O365 offering, so the path of least resistance is to just go for it. The other thing is that Google is impossible to deal with. Their product is awesome, but enterprises are a hobby for them. Their field sales and SE force is small and have a limited scope. They come off inflexible, while it's easy to get Microsoft or partners to do all sorts of stuff on a pre-sale basis. Microsoft has the advantage of interia around the traditional office suite and email. The other services are shit. Skype is an abomination. SharePoint is little better.
- s3r3nity 10y ago
  >The other services are shit. Our company (~200+) just started using MSFT Teams, and I find it's pretty underrated. It's not as polished as a Slack/Hipchat, but the MSFT team is super responsive to our feedback, and you can tell they're excited about iterating on it. I wish Skype was a bit better, I agree - but I'm hoping their recent restructure of the Skype team will help this moving forward.
  - Spooky23 10y ago
    Hasn't arrived for my tenant yet, I'm really looking forward to it. I agree they are great at ops and some of the smaller new products. But the legacy of things like Lync/Skype and SharePoint is a boat anchor.
deleted 10y ago
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chatterbeak 10y ago
We "switched back" to Microsoft for cloud drop-box-type services and applications. There's a great deal where for the same cost as a premium DropBox subscription you get Microsoft One Drive + Office in the cloud + a license for the desktop office suite. And Outlook email that you can have on your own domain. And it works well.
rwc 10y ago
One of my biggest frustrations running my business on G Suite is knowing if the product is something Google seriously cares about. With Office, there's a predictable schedule of product updates and I never doubt Microsoft's seriousness about maintaining Office hegemony. Meanwhile Google's communications about G Suite updates and roadmap leave much to be desired. One example of Google not prioritizing desktop software: finally Google Drive for Teams is in the pipeline, delivering a "hard drive in the cloud" concept (helping our team understand everybody has their own drive has been nightmarish). But in the beta testing, they don't support the desktop app at all for sync. What's the point of that?
nickpp 10y ago
We're using G Suite at work and while Mail, Calendar and Docs are OK, the other apps in their offering are atrocious. I'll give you some examples. Sheets has problems well documented online for years. No recent activity on them whatsoever. Groups (which is used pretty much everywhere as the only roles&permissions mechanism) are like mailing lists from last century. A separate interface kind-of-but-not-quite gmail threads replies by subject only! God forbid you try to use the "shared mailbox" surrogate. Directory doesn't even have calendar-integrated birthdays, something which is basic in a company. There is no Wiki. Its "replacement", Google Sites comes in two flavors: the old ones - feature complete but really dated and the new ones which don't even support tables or mail notifications... Compare that to the superb Microsoft OneNote... So I seriously wonder: how many people are working on this offering? Is this something Google gives a sh*t about? Do they intend to improve it in the future? Or should we cut our losses and switch now?
partiallypro 10y ago
Office 365 and G Suite are no comparable to be honest. My old company had 365 (Fortune 500 company,) my new one has G Suite (Start-up.) I miss Office 365. I actually just use my personal copy of Office 365 on my own device (BYOD.) Also from a Sysadmin view Office 365 is miles ahead of where older versions of office were. The only problem I suppose is that G Suite is a bit cheaper and it attracts small-mid sized businesses. I do find their offering to be pretty sizable and they keep adding new products to Office 365 to existing members.
canterburry 10y ago
Hmmm...I wonder why S&P 1500 was the benchmark? It's kind of an atypical bracket for S&P companies to compare. Why not the more common 500, 1000 or 2000? Is it because the statistics come out in M$ favor when only looking at the 1500 bracket rather than 500 or 2000? Hmm...
ahmedfromtunis 10y ago
Honestly, I can't get this. I use both Office 365 (@ work) and Google (@ everywhere else). And oh boy how sluggish, impractical and featureless Office is. I HATE every second I spend using it. Hell, even Zoho Docs are much more smoother and UX friendly than that piece of sub-MVP piece of software that Office 365 is. Edit: I wanted just to say that I tried Office 365 on three different platforms: Ubuntu, Windows and macOS. On both Chrome and Firefox. Every time it's sooo slow, even just to list the files in a directory. Editing becomes hellish (with visible latency) if I type more than a couple of pages (I'm journalist by day). It's not that Google Drive is better than O365. EVERYTHING is better than O365.
Anardo 10y ago
No fucking shit! Google makes a product, and then goes to fucking sleep like a little fucking bitch.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
That's the benefit of a real enterprise sales force who already sell them their Windows, Office and SQL Server licenses. Office 365 is probably just an upsell rather than an entirely new product. And Microsoft has actual reliable support, unlike Google. It makes a difference when selling into large companies.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
It's important to differentiate the offerings. O365 without access to their desktop apps is a sub par experience that is easily bested by G Suite. If you do have access to the full blown Office apps then, of course, the O365 solution is better. Albeit, MS will make you pay dearly for it.
Ironlink 10y ago
We're currently going through a migration from G Suite to Office 365, and so far my impression of Office is mostly downright bad. All of the online apps seem like slow knock-off products. In particular, Excel Online feels like a joke compared to Google Spreadsheets. At first you notice the sluggish movement of focus from cell to cell due to this ridiculous animation. Then when you select a cell value from a drop-down and hit tab, focus moves down instead of to the right, which is infuriating when you suddenly find yourself typing in the wrong cell. Somehow they screwed up copy and paste as well, sometimes pasting takes multiple seconds. Then if you work on something else for a bit, the page gives you an error about inactivity and makes you reload in order to resume. The whole thing is so bad I do my work in Google Spreadsheets and then copy the finished work into Excel Online. As a developer, one of my primary use-cases for spreadsheets is to generate and maintain an overview of different legacy implementations, the state of their rewrite, and any changes in behavior we've made. This type of work is largely done collaboratively with other devs and project leads. Turns out this type of real time collaboration for spreadsheets is basically dead with Office 365. It feels like we're going backwards in time, I used to just share the document and others would make their changes, but now we're fighting over file locks and in a few cases I've heard of people sending files back and forth with email. Also, I really miss the "Shared with me" view in Google Drive. With OneDrive there is a separate drive for myself and for each group I'm a member of. When someone shares a file with one of my groups it doesn't show up in my OneDrive, I have to look through each of the groups' OneDrive. Oh, and the online scheduling assistant is useless when you invite a group of people. The whole group shows up as one "person" who is busy as soon as anyone is busy. Also, noone can see the RSVP status except for the organizer, so when our scrum master is home sick I have no idea who has accepted the meeting. And why do canceled meetings stay in my calendar but renamed to "Canceled: XYZ"? /rant
- raarts 10y ago
  I have similar experiences. For a customer I need to use O365, but if you don't need it for some features it really feels backwards. Spreadsheets that kill your session after very short idle times, using multiple accounts gets confused, constantly choosing between Web and desktop version of the software, shared editing very clunky, sharepoint just sucking in general, I can't get used to it.
tek-cyb-org 10y ago
in other news, water is liquid.
ksec 10y ago
May be some big company has access to Google. But Microsoft has much better support for the rest of us, SME or Large Enterprise. And Google simply dont "get" it. Not Business, Not Enterprise. Newest Office is pretty nice, they finally refined Ribbon to a point where it is half usable. And Hosted Exchange is simply much better then Gmail. Having used IBM Notes, Gmail and Exchange, I am surprised Exchange works better with iOS out of the box. I was actually looking for some light weight alternative to Office, Exchange Email, One Drive. But i have find none so far. There may be services that individually works better then Office counterpart, but as a package it seems M$ Ecosystem is hard to beat right now.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
While I use some Google products (AppEngine, GCP, Play movies+music), I don't think they compete with Office 365 where for $99/year family plan my wife and I each get 1 TB cloud storage and all the Office apps that we use on Mac laptops, Android phones, and our iPads. Such a good deal, and once when I needed customer service it was there and someone helped within a few minutes.
mrmondo 10y ago
O365 is the most unreliable, haphazard, glued together, frequently unavailable piece of $&,$/$! that my team and I have used for 4 years. I can honestly say that I have never in my life experienced such repeatedly unreliable software in my life. Worse yet it's backed by the most incapable off-shored and overworked support team(s) that we now no longer bother to log queries with.
ksk 10y ago
Hmm, our office went from using Google docs/office to Office 365 Online, to finally using the desktop version. The web versions of frankly both products seemed just too slow and unreliable.

153 points by ah- 10y ago

Setting aside the accuracy of the data collection here, is it any surprise that companies prefer an enterprise focused product backed by support contracts, SEs, and actual desktop/mobile apps instead of web interfaces? Oh, and one cannot overlook the power of Excel lock-in here - the number of business lines run on excel macros in this country is staggering...

TAForObvReasons 10y ago
Office Professional 2016 is $400. The closest equivalent is Office 365 ProPlus (the other enterprise plans add lots of extra stuff not included in the standalone) which is $12/mo. For an upgrade cycle shorter than 3 years, 365 is cheaper. Even for a longer cycle, the standalone is a significant outlay compared to the monthly cost. So you are comparing a no-risk (since you can always fall back to the native apps) negligible cost solution to the google solution
gdulli 10y ago
Yeah, personally I find desktop apps to be much more usable than shoehorning complex functionality into a browser tab, which is always awkward. My current company was on Google apps for about 2 years and then switched to Office for the last 2 years. I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it. I will say the "cloud" evolution of Microsoft Office is annoying. Every time I start a new document it wants to default to saving it to OneDrive and pops up a login window. I just want to work on local files, dammit.
- knz 10y ago
  > I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it. My employer is trying to roll out O365 to the enterprise. Some of us have been using Google without official IT blessing (due to needing to get shit done in the absence of an official solution) for years. The biggest pain point so far as been moving from Hangouts to Skype for chat. The UI on Skype is awful - multiple pop up's instead of one page (https://hangouts.google.com/ https://hangouts.google.com/), a native client that wants to update way too often vs a website, and for some reason every new conversation with someone starts a new window even if the person already has one open. It's a joke.
  - raesene9 10y ago
    you could always use Microsoft Teams for chat now... (https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-software https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat...)
    - knz 10y ago
      That actually looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.
      - jyrkesh 10y ago
        Teams even works as a fully-functional (i.e. chat, voice, video, groups) replacement client for Skype for Business. In my opinion, it works much better as a SFB client; hoping it eventually just takes over SFB.
    - hashhar 10y ago
      One of my uncle's companies moved to Teams recently from Zoom (and Hangouts before that) and I once heard quite a lot of praise from him. Can it be used for personal use? Like in peer to peer?
      - jermaustin1 10y ago
        The company I work for just got on teams, and it integrates with our organization at the Active Directory level. We can do personal chats, meetings and messages, but only to others INSIDE our organization. It isn't a deal breaker, but firing up a screenshare/meeting to a vendor is impossible through it.
        hashhar 10y ago
        Thanks for the info. I have yet to get into a job (will be starting this summer) so I didn't know much about this stuff but am excited.
  - gdulli 10y ago
- CPAhem 10y ago
  > I can't say MS is better at everything MS is way better at support, which is a crucial factor in business. Our small company we have found that G Suite had almost non-existent support from Google. Finding a human at Google to talk to, or even reply to a forum post is very difficult.
  - ohstopitu 10y ago
    if you are paying for google apps, it's insanely easy to talk to Google Support[0]. I've contacted Google Support for a lot of issues (some insanely trivial, and some pretty complicated - both via phone and chat and they have yet to disappoint me). MS has always been in the enterprise world and they've honed their skills on it. But imo, G Suite is not too far behind when it comes to support - but it is lacking in other areas - like not having native apps. [0] https://support.google.com/a/?hl=en#topic=29157&contact=1 https://support.google.com/a/?hl=en#topic=29157&contact=1
- lwkl 10y ago
  I think there is a setting where you can change the default save location to local. I don't know if it disables the popup though.
joezydeco 10y ago
Active Directory lock-in is huge as well.

TAForObvReasons 10y ago

TIL S&P 1500 refers to the combination of the the S&P 500, S&P Mid cap (400) and S&P Small cap (600) companies: http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/ http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/

sz4kerto 10y ago

Of course it does. We (@ work) use G Suite and it's good if you use it for simple things, but it's really a toy. People who work a _lot_ with long-ish documents all know that Word is better (because of richer functionality); and people who work with larger spreadsheets know that Excel is better (functionality and performance). It's the typical situation: no user uses more than 5% of Excel's functionality -- but users don't use the same 5%. Where G Suite is great is 3rd party integrations, especially ones targeting small/mid size companies.

hackcrafter 10y ago
The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it. O365 took the idea and ran. Yes, their web-based UI isn't as rich, but it has some decent collaboration, really good mobile apps and of course excellent desktop native apps. Google could have held their lead IMHO if they kept building out their Docs/Sheets to be closer to feature-parity with Word/Excel and started earlier on good mobile and desktop native apps (which don't even exist!) I love me some google docs for collaborative editing, but your right in the scaling of large docs in Word and Excel functionality.
- TAForObvReasons 10y ago
  Google docs has to become office in terms of feature parity faster than office online has to match google docs because the microsoft price point is comparable to the standalone. Microsoft can always push people to use the native word and excel apps for certain features because it's covered in the cost of the 365 sub, but google can't do the same because it's a separate cost.
  - hackcrafter 10y ago
    Yea, I agree. I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365, but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company. Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing. Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+ commitments to one office suite or another. Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.

advisedwang 10y ago

Very curious to see what the delta is next time they run this analysis. The trend is really more indicative of success than a single snapshot, I believe.

dispose13432 10y ago
The trend seems to be going to MS also. Remember that Google pioneered the idea.
- type0 10y ago
  I don't think it's true, although the dates on wikipedia might be wrong and I have no time or interest to look on the sources. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_Suite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_S... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides
us0r 10y ago
Okta has some more info and a lot of blog posts on it. https://www.okta.com/Businesses-At-Work/2016-03/ https://www.okta.com/Businesses-At-Work/2016-03/
- RachelF 10y ago
  That's better data than the original link - thanks.

chrisper 10y ago

I am using O365 for my own domain (with only 1 user) and had only great experiences so far. The support is great too!

Apocryphon 10y ago

Just this morning I found myself unable to switch between two Google Drive accounts, because both of them had the same domain, @gmail.com. Signing out of a single account leads to all accounts being signed out. Gmail was launched 12 years ago. Why, Google, why?

luma 10y ago
If you're a G suite user you'll find a lot of weird corner-case situations where you simply cannot use various services and features elsewhere in the Google portfolio. Want to setup a family account in G Music? Not supported if your account is G suite. Want to check your calendar with the new Google Home? Can't be done if you are a G Suite user. The list goes on and on. It's the weirdest thing, because you'd think Google would want to cater to their paying customers first.
CPAhem 10y ago
The default Google Drive client is pretty basic and limited to one account at a time. Google probably has not prioritized desktop software like Drive. There are third party clients that provide more features like Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com http://syncdocs.com which can sync multiple @gmail accounts to Google Drive. >Why, Google, why? Google probably prefers you to keep one account for targeting advertising, plus each Drive account comes with 15GB free space, so multiple Drive accounts give you more free space.
amerkhalid 10y ago
Another issue that drives me nuts with Google Drive is that it crashes Lightroom if I keep LR catalog in Drive folder. I either have to shutdown Drive while working in Lightroom or move catalog out of Drive folder. I don't think I ever had crashes when I kept catalog in Dropbox folder. Once my subscription runs out, I will probably try out OneDrive or go back to Dropbox.
- therealmarv 10y ago
  That's a problem of their Google Drive Desktop Sync program. I also hated it (it also sucks a lot of CPU). Since switching to Insync for desktop synching all my problems with GDrive are gone. Google should buy this tiny company for their great work with GDrive.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

This isn't too surprising, as a paid G Suite user my 'help' experience was better than that of the free version (at the time) but it was still sub-par to the support Microsoft gave for even small businesses that bought 15 licenses to Office. The killer is that Google still has not cracked the 'support people who don't like to use computers but have to' nut and it is very very hard for them to get there. Until they can get there I don't see them making either serious inroads or serious cash flow from any consumer facing app/device.

bla2 10y ago

Office has been around for over 25 years. Most businesses use it, and 365 is included. So isn't the surprise that G Suite (silly name) shows up anywhere on the same scale at all, with it being a third as old?

nunez 10y ago

You'd be surprised by the number of companies locked into Microsoft products.

pjmlp 10y ago
Willingly, because most competition is actually worse.
hashhar 10y ago
Well, in the office space they do make better products and support than all of their competitors.

tangue 10y ago

Anecdata : I tried to switch the company to Gsuite by sharing more and more docs using the personal version. It works well until for some reason they changed the way to create a new document, instead of the classical file > new it was a big "+" sign at the bottom of the screen. Nobody could figure it out and even if they switched back to a more classical ui later (or that we were in the wrong sample of an A/B) usage of drive and Google Apps declined.

keeganjw 10y ago

To be fair, by far the most powerful weapon the Spaniards had was disease, not technology. That's what ended up killing millions of Native Americans. So, it's a bit of a weird analogy...

Melkman 10y ago
You mean like a virus ? I found it a weird analogy because I couldn't figure out who are supposed to be the Spaniards. Is it Google because they are up against a competitor that is massively entrenched in the office suite market ? Or is it Microsoft because they seem to be expanding their presence.

FussyZeus 10y ago

I pay for O365 but barely use the web apps. Google's losing IMHO because web apps suck, simple as that. Yes every once in awhile I'll fire one of them up because I need to check something and then 30 seconds later I'll remember why I never use them; slow, clunky, unstable. Native apps forever (or until the infrastructure is built out more at least.)

nu5500 10y ago
And if you have something like a Surface, the native apps have great inking support. Just open up a Word doc, sign it and send it back. The web apps are nice in a pinch, but I find that they have these (probably intentional) shortcomings that make them fall short of doing real day-to-day work. For example, no format painter in Excel Online. That doesn't make any sense to me and these features should at least be available to paying customers.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I'd imagine it's about half intentional, half limitations of the platform. Doing some of the stuff that Excel does in a browser would be maddening.

Spooky23 10y ago

Microsoft put the hard squeeze on EA customers and just turned their reseller model upside down. Most people are forced into paying for some sort of O365 offering, so the path of least resistance is to just go for it. The other thing is that Google is impossible to deal with. Their product is awesome, but enterprises are a hobby for them. Their field sales and SE force is small and have a limited scope. They come off inflexible, while it's easy to get Microsoft or partners to do all sorts of stuff on a pre-sale basis. Microsoft has the advantage of interia around the traditional office suite and email. The other services are shit. Skype is an abomination. SharePoint is little better.

s3r3nity 10y ago
>The other services are shit. Our company (~200+) just started using MSFT Teams, and I find it's pretty underrated. It's not as polished as a Slack/Hipchat, but the MSFT team is super responsive to our feedback, and you can tell they're excited about iterating on it. I wish Skype was a bit better, I agree - but I'm hoping their recent restructure of the Skype team will help this moving forward.
- Spooky23 10y ago
  Hasn't arrived for my tenant yet, I'm really looking forward to it. I agree they are great at ops and some of the smaller new products. But the legacy of things like Lync/Skype and SharePoint is a boat anchor.

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chatterbeak 10y ago

We "switched back" to Microsoft for cloud drop-box-type services and applications. There's a great deal where for the same cost as a premium DropBox subscription you get Microsoft One Drive + Office in the cloud + a license for the desktop office suite. And Outlook email that you can have on your own domain. And it works well.

rwc 10y ago

One of my biggest frustrations running my business on G Suite is knowing if the product is something Google seriously cares about. With Office, there's a predictable schedule of product updates and I never doubt Microsoft's seriousness about maintaining Office hegemony. Meanwhile Google's communications about G Suite updates and roadmap leave much to be desired. One example of Google not prioritizing desktop software: finally Google Drive for Teams is in the pipeline, delivering a "hard drive in the cloud" concept (helping our team understand everybody has their own drive has been nightmarish). But in the beta testing, they don't support the desktop app at all for sync. What's the point of that?

nickpp 10y ago

We're using G Suite at work and while Mail, Calendar and Docs are OK, the other apps in their offering are atrocious. I'll give you some examples. Sheets has problems well documented online for years. No recent activity on them whatsoever. Groups (which is used pretty much everywhere as the only roles&permissions mechanism) are like mailing lists from last century. A separate interface kind-of-but-not-quite gmail threads replies by subject only! God forbid you try to use the "shared mailbox" surrogate. Directory doesn't even have calendar-integrated birthdays, something which is basic in a company. There is no Wiki. Its "replacement", Google Sites comes in two flavors: the old ones - feature complete but really dated and the new ones which don't even support tables or mail notifications... Compare that to the superb Microsoft OneNote... So I seriously wonder: how many people are working on this offering? Is this something Google gives a sh*t about? Do they intend to improve it in the future? Or should we cut our losses and switch now?

partiallypro 10y ago

Office 365 and G Suite are no comparable to be honest. My old company had 365 (Fortune 500 company,) my new one has G Suite (Start-up.) I miss Office 365. I actually just use my personal copy of Office 365 on my own device (BYOD.) Also from a Sysadmin view Office 365 is miles ahead of where older versions of office were. The only problem I suppose is that G Suite is a bit cheaper and it attracts small-mid sized businesses. I do find their offering to be pretty sizable and they keep adding new products to Office 365 to existing members.

canterburry 10y ago

Hmmm...I wonder why S&P 1500 was the benchmark? It's kind of an atypical bracket for S&P companies to compare. Why not the more common 500, 1000 or 2000? Is it because the statistics come out in M$ favor when only looking at the 1500 bracket rather than 500 or 2000? Hmm...

ahmedfromtunis 10y ago

Honestly, I can't get this. I use both Office 365 (@ work) and Google (@ everywhere else). And oh boy how sluggish, impractical and featureless Office is. I HATE every second I spend using it. Hell, even Zoho Docs are much more smoother and UX friendly than that piece of sub-MVP piece of software that Office 365 is. Edit: I wanted just to say that I tried Office 365 on three different platforms: Ubuntu, Windows and macOS. On both Chrome and Firefox. Every time it's sooo slow, even just to list the files in a directory. Editing becomes hellish (with visible latency) if I type more than a couple of pages (I'm journalist by day). It's not that Google Drive is better than O365. EVERYTHING is better than O365.

Anardo 10y ago

No fucking shit! Google makes a product, and then goes to fucking sleep like a little fucking bitch.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

That's the benefit of a real enterprise sales force who already sell them their Windows, Office and SQL Server licenses. Office 365 is probably just an upsell rather than an entirely new product. And Microsoft has actual reliable support, unlike Google. It makes a difference when selling into large companies.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

It's important to differentiate the offerings. O365 without access to their desktop apps is a sub par experience that is easily bested by G Suite. If you do have access to the full blown Office apps then, of course, the O365 solution is better. Albeit, MS will make you pay dearly for it.

Ironlink 10y ago

We're currently going through a migration from G Suite to Office 365, and so far my impression of Office is mostly downright bad. All of the online apps seem like slow knock-off products. In particular, Excel Online feels like a joke compared to Google Spreadsheets. At first you notice the sluggish movement of focus from cell to cell due to this ridiculous animation. Then when you select a cell value from a drop-down and hit tab, focus moves down instead of to the right, which is infuriating when you suddenly find yourself typing in the wrong cell. Somehow they screwed up copy and paste as well, sometimes pasting takes multiple seconds. Then if you work on something else for a bit, the page gives you an error about inactivity and makes you reload in order to resume. The whole thing is so bad I do my work in Google Spreadsheets and then copy the finished work into Excel Online. As a developer, one of my primary use-cases for spreadsheets is to generate and maintain an overview of different legacy implementations, the state of their rewrite, and any changes in behavior we've made. This type of work is largely done collaboratively with other devs and project leads. Turns out this type of real time collaboration for spreadsheets is basically dead with Office 365. It feels like we're going backwards in time, I used to just share the document and others would make their changes, but now we're fighting over file locks and in a few cases I've heard of people sending files back and forth with email. Also, I really miss the "Shared with me" view in Google Drive. With OneDrive there is a separate drive for myself and for each group I'm a member of. When someone shares a file with one of my groups it doesn't show up in my OneDrive, I have to look through each of the groups' OneDrive. Oh, and the online scheduling assistant is useless when you invite a group of people. The whole group shows up as one "person" who is busy as soon as anyone is busy. Also, noone can see the RSVP status except for the organizer, so when our scrum master is home sick I have no idea who has accepted the meeting. And why do canceled meetings stay in my calendar but renamed to "Canceled: XYZ"? /rant

raarts 10y ago
I have similar experiences. For a customer I need to use O365, but if you don't need it for some features it really feels backwards. Spreadsheets that kill your session after very short idle times, using multiple accounts gets confused, constantly choosing between Web and desktop version of the software, shared editing very clunky, sharepoint just sucking in general, I can't get used to it.

tek-cyb-org 10y ago

in other news, water is liquid.

ksec 10y ago

May be some big company has access to Google. But Microsoft has much better support for the rest of us, SME or Large Enterprise. And Google simply dont "get" it. Not Business, Not Enterprise. Newest Office is pretty nice, they finally refined Ribbon to a point where it is half usable. And Hosted Exchange is simply much better then Gmail. Having used IBM Notes, Gmail and Exchange, I am surprised Exchange works better with iOS out of the box. I was actually looking for some light weight alternative to Office, Exchange Email, One Drive. But i have find none so far. There may be services that individually works better then Office counterpart, but as a package it seems M$ Ecosystem is hard to beat right now.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

While I use some Google products (AppEngine, GCP, Play movies+music), I don't think they compete with Office 365 where for $99/year family plan my wife and I each get 1 TB cloud storage and all the Office apps that we use on Mac laptops, Android phones, and our iPads. Such a good deal, and once when I needed customer service it was there and someone helped within a few minutes.

mrmondo 10y ago

O365 is the most unreliable, haphazard, glued together, frequently unavailable piece of $&,$/$! that my team and I have used for 4 years. I can honestly say that I have never in my life experienced such repeatedly unreliable software in my life. Worse yet it's backed by the most incapable off-shored and overworked support team(s) that we now no longer bother to log queries with.

ksk 10y ago

Hmm, our office went from using Google docs/office to Office 365 Online, to finally using the desktop version. The web versions of frankly both products seemed just too slow and unreliable.