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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

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.
    - dleslie 10y ago
      Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?
      - sithadmin 10y ago
        No. They don't really accomplish the same goals, and SharePoint Online is still a going concern. That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.
        toyg 10y ago
        OneDrive and Sharepoint are the worst part of O365. After the simplicity of Dropbox "one big drive in the cloud", it's a real pain to figure out how you're supposed to work with OD/SP - and good luck doing it without a dedicated fulltime SP admin.
        jyrkesh 10y ago
        Not since they replaced the OneDrive for Business Client: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the-previous-OneDrive-for-Business-sync-client-4100df3a-0c96-464f-b0a8-c20de34da6fa https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the... AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.
      - hackcrafter 10y ago
        Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services. Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)
  - nashashmi 10y ago
    And here is the dilemma with competing with Microsoft: Compete with Microsoft and forever spend your time with bug fixes, parity issues, and new features the other guy implements. ... OR create enough of the part that essentially means productivity app, but then branch out into your own space and create a product that differentiates itself and creates lock-in. Google knows that doing the latter is like a dog forever chasing fox and never winning, so it eventually called timoeut on parity and branched off into doing something new and exciting.
    - AlphaSite 10y ago
      What has google done which O365 isn't doing equally well? Google Docs just isn't very great.
      - chris_wot 10y ago
        Your may have been downvoted, but it's true. I work for a company that drank the Google coolaid and it was a dreadful decision. Virtually no one uses Google Docs or Sheets. Instead, they struggle on without it, or have their department purchase an incredibly expensive version of Office. The Google experiment has failed in our organisation. Google Groups and Gmail is a bit of a disaster. Google can't even do basic things, like relabel all email older than a certain date. And the admin interface is ridiculously slow, and frankly buggy. One time, I logged into this frequently used interface and discovered that I got prompted with a post it note every freaking time. That might not seem like much, but it slowed me down and we are under the pump at the moment. Overall, Google has such great ideas but is totally let down by an utter lack of polish and a total inability to improve their UX, and ensure that they finish off features and products. So much potential let down by incredibly simple UX errors. It's unbelievably disappointing :(
        douche 10y ago
        The thing about Google Docs is, it looks and has the same functionality now as it did circa ten years ago when I first remember using it. I'm not sure what that department in the Googleplex is occupying their time with.
- macspoofing 10y ago
  >The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it. Did they ever have it? Did they ever care about it? Google Docs languished for such a long time and Google never made a real push into the Enterprise.
  - Analemma_ 10y ago
    I think they did care, but they just assumed that the same model which worked in the consumer space (enthusiasm among tech-literate people which then spreads to other people by word-of-mouth, but no support whatsoever) would work for enterprise sales. In their defense, it sometimes does (like for Slack), but it's a different ballgame when you're competing directly against Microsoft and their well-established sales channels.
  - Gravityloss 10y ago
    Office 365 in term of collaborative text document editing is still behind google docs circa 2008. But I haven't noticed any improvements to google docs since the early days. You can't create templates, you can't upload fonts, a million other things that make it not really usable in a professional setting for external communication.
- andrewbinstock 10y ago
  >The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it. No, Google was never going to own the market segment once MS got into it seriously. Google could only mark time until that event.
muse900 10y ago
I think this is gonna change in time. Yes atm Microsoft is the leader of that industry and yes generally most of the larger companies and mid companies use Word/Excel/PP on a day to day basis. Although I think the newer generations care a bit less about e.g Word etc and they are also more tech savy on doing hard things on google sheets etc, while the older generations might find it extremely hard to convert from Excel to google sheets etc. Although another factor is laws etc and privacy policies. Google is much less flexible than office365 when it comes to who owns the data, although of course you have to pay for office365 while for google stuff usually you dont have to pay hence your companies docs might be owned by google and I don't see any sane human being wanting that.
- harigov 10y ago
  GSuite is paid version. AFAIK, they removed the free version. If you have to pay for either of them, and the price difference isn't astronomical, I can see more people choosing office365 over gsuite.
- shmed 10y ago
  We are talking about S&P 1500 companies. None of them will be using the "free version" of Google docs that come with their free gmail account. The G Apps suite is pretty close in price to the full Office365 package. I simply cant see any major advantage to pay for G Apps over O365.
  - tkubacki 10y ago
    We are small dev shop - Google suite is cheaper, is good enough and has good integration with paid Gmail.
    - jermaustin1 10y ago
      I pay $15/mo per user for full Office, Exchange, Microsoft Teams/Skype and very decent support. GSuite is $10/user and offers similar products, but you have to pretty much support yourself. The $20 extra a month I pay for my small team is negligible. The company I work for pays even less per person than I do, with the enterprise licensing and the MS cash that gets thrown at us for integrating with them. Our first year of 365 is basically free, same with our switch from our data center to the cloud. We are looking to save millions a month by making this move.
XJOKOLAT 10y ago
I'd distinguish between O365 (crap) and native apps like MS Excel, etc. In my experience G Suite and O365 are equivalent. Useful for a few things, rubbish for anything serious.
- jyrkesh 10y ago
  Except that an O365 subscription includes the native apps, so the crappy webapp stuff is just a free bonus for enterprises staying on the good native stuff.
  - petepete 10y ago
    Not all subscriptions do. We're on the bottom rung and don't qualify for the native apps (don't ask why, but apparently for ~60k users it's too expensive). We moved from G apps to O365 and I prefer the former. Yes, some people (finance) need excel but most people use it as a glorified list manager.
    - basch 10y ago
      $8/m vs $20/m https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-offi... so that would be $3/4 of a million a year to jump to include all desktop apps.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
manyxcxi 10y ago
We started our company on G Suite, and after about year switched to O365. At the end of the day, there were two big factors: 1. We were still paying a subscription for Office while on G Suite, the cost to change to fully O365 was at worst net-neutral, but definitely saved about $5/mo per head on paper. 2. Calendaring for Google sucks. We're a distributed team, we have recurring meetings, and lots of updates across various devices. Meeting updates were frequently not persisting to users, cancelled recurring meetings were not going away, etc. Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues. Outlook/Exchange may be 'non-standard' as far as not playing by the specs, but it really is the standard for anyone who's spent time in a big company, and it was getting really embarrassing when our Google Calendar invites were not playing well with our potential and current clients' Exchange systems and Outlook clients. I do miss the Google Apps sign in to all the various services we use. Some have integration w/ O365 or generic identity authentications, but most either don't or charge a lot extra. Other than that, I don't miss a single thing from G suite that O365 doesn't do just the same or a little better.
- amaks 10y ago
  "Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues." Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite. We use Google Calendar throughout (I worked at Google) and never had problems.
  - zaidf 10y ago
    Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite That is not his problem. That is google's problem. Ironically, thinking that this is the user's problem may be the root of google lagging in this area. Microsoft Exchange is deeply entrenched in the corporate world. When you send an invite to a client (or vice versa) and it fails due to integration issues, the typical client will be thinking "oh this is weird; I don't have issues with accepting or sending invites to anyone else!". You don't want to be that guy in your client's head.
FigBug 10y ago
I gave up on G Suite after the second time somebody blew away all our documents by moving their Google drive folder. You think they could put a safety check in there when G Drive starts up and the folder is empty, "Do you want to delete everything? or do you want to download again?" And there doesn't seem to be a good way to backup Google Documents since they aren't actually documents but just a link to the document.
bitmapbrother 10y ago
Just curious, do you also consider the web version of O365 to be a "toy" as well?

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.
  - dleslie 10y ago
    Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?
    - sithadmin 10y ago
      No. They don't really accomplish the same goals, and SharePoint Online is still a going concern. That said, just as Skype and Skype for Business are very different beasts under the hood, One Drive and One Drive for Business are also quite different, the latter being shoehorned on top of SharePoint.
      - toyg 10y ago
        OneDrive and Sharepoint are the worst part of O365. After the simplicity of Dropbox "one big drive in the cloud", it's a real pain to figure out how you're supposed to work with OD/SP - and good luck doing it without a dedicated fulltime SP admin.
      - jyrkesh 10y ago
        Not since they replaced the OneDrive for Business Client: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the-previous-OneDrive-for-Business-sync-client-4100df3a-0c96-464f-b0a8-c20de34da6fa https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Transition-from-the... AFAIK, it's all basically OneDrive under the hood now. Which is great because all the Groove/SharePoint based syncing was awful before.
    - hackcrafter 10y ago
      Maybe from a tech perspective, but the SharePoint "brand" is still heavily used in O365 enterprise for the same file-syncing stuff that OneDrive does in consumer-services. Which brings up another O365 nit, MS has these direct consumer services and O365 services all on different account silos such that when I log into O365 I have to go through a decision tree that answers two levels of questions about which _account_ my company email address is referring to: MS Personal vs Organization Issued vs Organization but Personally Created (not sure how the last category exists)
- nashashmi 10y ago
  And here is the dilemma with competing with Microsoft: Compete with Microsoft and forever spend your time with bug fixes, parity issues, and new features the other guy implements. ... OR create enough of the part that essentially means productivity app, but then branch out into your own space and create a product that differentiates itself and creates lock-in. Google knows that doing the latter is like a dog forever chasing fox and never winning, so it eventually called timoeut on parity and branched off into doing something new and exciting.
  - AlphaSite 10y ago
    What has google done which O365 isn't doing equally well? Google Docs just isn't very great.
    - chris_wot 10y ago
      Your may have been downvoted, but it's true. I work for a company that drank the Google coolaid and it was a dreadful decision. Virtually no one uses Google Docs or Sheets. Instead, they struggle on without it, or have their department purchase an incredibly expensive version of Office. The Google experiment has failed in our organisation. Google Groups and Gmail is a bit of a disaster. Google can't even do basic things, like relabel all email older than a certain date. And the admin interface is ridiculously slow, and frankly buggy. One time, I logged into this frequently used interface and discovered that I got prompted with a post it note every freaking time. That might not seem like much, but it slowed me down and we are under the pump at the moment. Overall, Google has such great ideas but is totally let down by an utter lack of polish and a total inability to improve their UX, and ensure that they finish off features and products. So much potential let down by incredibly simple UX errors. It's unbelievably disappointing :(
      - douche 10y ago
        The thing about Google Docs is, it looks and has the same functionality now as it did circa ten years ago when I first remember using it. I'm not sure what that department in the Googleplex is occupying their time with.
macspoofing 10y ago
>The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it. Did they ever have it? Did they ever care about it? Google Docs languished for such a long time and Google never made a real push into the Enterprise.
- Analemma_ 10y ago
  I think they did care, but they just assumed that the same model which worked in the consumer space (enthusiasm among tech-literate people which then spreads to other people by word-of-mouth, but no support whatsoever) would work for enterprise sales. In their defense, it sometimes does (like for Slack), but it's a different ballgame when you're competing directly against Microsoft and their well-established sales channels.
- Gravityloss 10y ago
  Office 365 in term of collaborative text document editing is still behind google docs circa 2008. But I haven't noticed any improvements to google docs since the early days. You can't create templates, you can't upload fonts, a million other things that make it not really usable in a professional setting for external communication.
andrewbinstock 10y ago
>The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I think they are losing it. No, Google was never going to own the market segment once MS got into it seriously. Google could only mark time until that event.

muse900 10y ago

I think this is gonna change in time. Yes atm Microsoft is the leader of that industry and yes generally most of the larger companies and mid companies use Word/Excel/PP on a day to day basis. Although I think the newer generations care a bit less about e.g Word etc and they are also more tech savy on doing hard things on google sheets etc, while the older generations might find it extremely hard to convert from Excel to google sheets etc. Although another factor is laws etc and privacy policies. Google is much less flexible than office365 when it comes to who owns the data, although of course you have to pay for office365 while for google stuff usually you dont have to pay hence your companies docs might be owned by google and I don't see any sane human being wanting that.

harigov 10y ago
GSuite is paid version. AFAIK, they removed the free version. If you have to pay for either of them, and the price difference isn't astronomical, I can see more people choosing office365 over gsuite.
shmed 10y ago
We are talking about S&P 1500 companies. None of them will be using the "free version" of Google docs that come with their free gmail account. The G Apps suite is pretty close in price to the full Office365 package. I simply cant see any major advantage to pay for G Apps over O365.
- tkubacki 10y ago
  We are small dev shop - Google suite is cheaper, is good enough and has good integration with paid Gmail.
  - jermaustin1 10y ago
    I pay $15/mo per user for full Office, Exchange, Microsoft Teams/Skype and very decent support. GSuite is $10/user and offers similar products, but you have to pretty much support yourself. The $20 extra a month I pay for my small team is negligible. The company I work for pays even less per person than I do, with the enterprise licensing and the MS cash that gets thrown at us for integrating with them. Our first year of 365 is basically free, same with our switch from our data center to the cloud. We are looking to save millions a month by making this move.

XJOKOLAT 10y ago

I'd distinguish between O365 (crap) and native apps like MS Excel, etc. In my experience G Suite and O365 are equivalent. Useful for a few things, rubbish for anything serious.

jyrkesh 10y ago
Except that an O365 subscription includes the native apps, so the crappy webapp stuff is just a free bonus for enterprises staying on the good native stuff.
- petepete 10y ago
  Not all subscriptions do. We're on the bottom rung and don't qualify for the native apps (don't ask why, but apparently for ~60k users it's too expensive). We moved from G apps to O365 and I prefer the former. Yes, some people (finance) need excel but most people use it as a glorified list manager.
  - basch 10y ago
    $8/m vs $20/m https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-offi... so that would be $3/4 of a million a year to jump to include all desktop apps.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]

manyxcxi 10y ago

We started our company on G Suite, and after about year switched to O365. At the end of the day, there were two big factors: 1. We were still paying a subscription for Office while on G Suite, the cost to change to fully O365 was at worst net-neutral, but definitely saved about $5/mo per head on paper. 2. Calendaring for Google sucks. We're a distributed team, we have recurring meetings, and lots of updates across various devices. Meeting updates were frequently not persisting to users, cancelled recurring meetings were not going away, etc. Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues. Outlook/Exchange may be 'non-standard' as far as not playing by the specs, but it really is the standard for anyone who's spent time in a big company, and it was getting really embarrassing when our Google Calendar invites were not playing well with our potential and current clients' Exchange systems and Outlook clients. I do miss the Google Apps sign in to all the various services we use. Some have integration w/ O365 or generic identity authentications, but most either don't or charge a lot extra. Other than that, I don't miss a single thing from G suite that O365 doesn't do just the same or a little better.

amaks 10y ago
"Heaven forbid you have someone that wants to cling to Outlook as their mail client, because then you'll have a whole host of other issues." Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite. We use Google Calendar throughout (I worked at Google) and never had problems.
- zaidf 10y ago
  Here is the root of your problem - your organization was in Exchange ecosystem before switching to G Suite That is not his problem. That is google's problem. Ironically, thinking that this is the user's problem may be the root of google lagging in this area. Microsoft Exchange is deeply entrenched in the corporate world. When you send an invite to a client (or vice versa) and it fails due to integration issues, the typical client will be thinking "oh this is weird; I don't have issues with accepting or sending invites to anyone else!". You don't want to be that guy in your client's head.

FigBug 10y ago

I gave up on G Suite after the second time somebody blew away all our documents by moving their Google drive folder. You think they could put a safety check in there when G Drive starts up and the folder is empty, "Do you want to delete everything? or do you want to download again?" And there doesn't seem to be a good way to backup Google Documents since they aren't actually documents but just a link to the document.

bitmapbrother 10y ago

Just curious, do you also consider the web version of O365 to be a "toy" as well?