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Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite
- MindTooth 9y agoHow to choose between two evils? Guess privacy were not on that list.
- komali2 9y agoWhat sort of loss of privacy would an Enterprise account experience in Office or gsuite?
- pintxo 9y agoLocal software (Office can still be run local only, I presume) vs cloud software?
- MindTooth 9y agoGoogle or Microsoft makes their money on analytical data. In other words; we are the product. Not the software. So what I ment is that they traded one evil for a another one.
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoGoogle's AI-based features are applied to G Suite as well as the public versions, AFAIK. So your emails still get swept up into their deep learning algorithm for generating Smart Replies and the like. A lot of Google's smart features technically "read your emails", and they are used on your account whether it's paid or not.
- petilon 9y agoMicrosoft Office and Adobe Acrobat are the biggest national security threats to the USA. Russia can shut down energy, water and nuclear plants in the US, and that's mostly thanks to the security flaws in Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat. In the interest of national security these products should be rewritten in Rust.
- freehunter 9y agoI was with you until the last sentence. Rust is not some magical "get out of bugs free" card. Bad programmers can write bad code in any language, and good programmers can write good code in any language. We need to take security more seriously for our national security, I agree. More security-minded programming languages and frameworks may help with that. But rewriting them in Rust won't magically make their problems go away.
- petilon 9y agoMemory related bugs (buffer overruns etc.) are the reason for most security bugs. Rust avoids these entire class of bugs. Yes, bad programmers can write bad code in any language, but you'd have to be really bad to cause memory related bugs in Rust.
- jeffnappi 9y agoExcept for the fact that there is nothing stopping developers from using `unsafe`* to do bad things. And considering they have the tool, they will use it. In addition, it is unlikely that any significantly large system would be realistic to write in 100% Rust. There will be plenty unsafe dependencies that are unavoidable. * https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/first-edition/unsafe.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/first-edition/unsafe.html
- freehunter 9y ago>Rust avoids these entire class of bugs Because Rust doesn't have the "unsafe" keyword, and no one would ever trade security for performance. Just like no one would ever misuse global variables just to make development easier. Just like no one would ever commit their signing keys into a public repo, just like no one would ever allow SQL to be run from user input, just like no one would ever you get the idea. The culture that led to Adobe or Microsoft products being the way they are/were is not dependent on the language they used. Gates' security memo in 2002 never once blamed the languages they developed in, it blamed the culture their products grew up in. And funny enough, they've gotten much more secure without ever switching programming languages. Again, I'm not anti-Rust. But buying a car with airbags doesn't mean you're never going to crash it, and it certainly doesn't mean you can never die in a crash.
- aaronarduino 9y agoHopefully, this will start a trend away from MS Office to other office programs. Preferably open source solutions.
- Analemma_ 9y agoWhy would you assume moving to GSuite is indicative of a trend toward open-source? You have even less control than with Office.
- braderhart 9y agoThat is simply not true. Google has been a much stronger supporter of open source. Ever heard of Android? What about Kubernetes? Chromium? Also, Google Docs supports exporting to ODS and other document formats... in addition to automatic conversion into Google Drive.
- freehunter 9y ago>Google has been a much stronger supporter of open source That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects. http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open-source-2016-9 http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-github-open-source-... In addition, there are quite a few high-profile open source software packages directly from Microsoft. https://opensource.microsoft.com https://opensource.microsoft.com
- patrickaljord 9y ago> That's debatable. According to GitHub, Microsoft is the biggest contributor to open source projects. Sorry but this is so wrong, Google does not host any of its biggest project on github: Chromium and Android. There were articles written about this.
- dec0dedab0de 9y agoYet android is distributed in a way leaves users with even less control than Windows.
- andygcook 9y agoCurious if Airbus moving over to GSuite has anything to do with Google Hangouts Chat launching and being included in GSuite as the final piece of the puzzle. Google didn't have an answer to Microsoft Teams, but now it does.
- sidcool 9y agoHangout chats is nowhere close to teams or slack. It's quite rudimentary
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- simplyinfinity 9y agoDo you imagine a CEO switching a whole company of this size because google released a new chat app? AFAIK those decisions are planned for a long time & costs are calculated + lost/gained productivity. What a terrible CEO would that be if they switched 130k people on a whim.
- jonas21 9y agoI can certainly imagine Airbus having a list of requirements that Google would have to satisfy as part of the contract to switch to GSuite, and it would seem reasonable that group chat might be on that list.
- pgm8705 9y agoNot too familiar with MS Teams, but I was pretty excited when Hangouts Chat rolled out a few weeks ago. I figured if we were already paying for GSuite, why not use Hangouts Chat to replace slack? I ended up being terribly disappointed. Hangouts Chat feels more like a message board than it does a chat app. Google needs to put a ton more work into it if they plan on getting people to convert from Slack.
- WHoWHo 9y agoThanks. Signed NSA & Boeing.
- amq 9y agoMaybe the main reason is email hosting, with gmail being so ubiquitous? Second reason could be better integration with mobile platforms. Other than that, one could think that GSuite is cheaper, but it's really roughly the same.
- NegativeLatency 9y agoCollaboration on the Microsoft product is not great compared to Google's offering.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ghlayman 9y agoGood that there has never been any industrial espionage US => Europe.
- Neracked 9y agoIt seems strange to use the present tense ("moves to GSuite", "ditches Microsoft") for a change that should take (at least) 5 to 10 years to implement. Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an office suite makes sense.
- joshuamorton 9y ago5 to 10 years? I think you're vastly overestimating the time it takes to do such a move. Maybe 5-10 months.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoThere is 'should' and there is 'does' :-) When IBM acquired Blekko they were moving people over to the web based version of Lotus notes at 1,000 employees a month (give or take) and with 450K employees that was a 30+ year timeline (it got faster as they worked out transition kinks but still) the point is that at certain scales these things are a lot more difficult for enterprises than you might expect. The biggest challenge (as I saw it) was making sure that everyone could email everyone else all through the transition because if email stops, the company stops in that portion. All of that to say that even though Airbus is one less than a third that many employees (133K vs 450k) its organization complexity is up there. And keeping complex organizations functional and efficient as possible during a large transition is often addressed by keeping the rate of change manageable (aka slower than you would expect).
- thesumofall 9y agoPeople need to be trained, documents moved and converted, business processes adapted, ... In addition, solutions will have to be found for documents that exceed GSuite’s capabilities. 10 years? No, but 2-3 years for sure.
- joshuamorton 9y agoFor 100% adoption sure, but for 95% or even 99% adoption, I doubt that long is necessary.
- redm 9y agoI love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets. I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc. IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.
- spaceflunky 9y ago>That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets. I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets. Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.
- JonathonW 9y agoFrankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do. Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).
- closeparen 9y agoCollaboration also goes beyond collaborating to produce the document. My company makes decisions in the comments of Google Doc proposals.
- rkwasny 9y agoCurious if anyone has tried Zoho? how does it compare
- dudus 9y agoIt compares poorly. Zoho is to GSuite what OpenOffice is to Microsoft Office.
- sridharvembu 9y agoZoho CEO here. Please take a look at our Workplace suite (Mail, Cliq, Connect, Docs & Office suite - collaboration and productivity) and judge it for yourself. Our Writer (word processor) and Show (presentation) have had major upgrades recently, and Sheet is getting upgraded too.
- kozikow 9y agoAirbus became a big user of Google cloud some time ago. Airbus made a presentation on last Google Cloud Next how they migrated core technology systems for satellite imagery storage and analytics to Google Cloud. Google Apps are a logical extension, as you can use same accounts for Google Cloud and email. There are some benefits of the integration - e.g. export BigQuery result as Google Sheets. They also had a CTO poached from Google.
- thesumofall 9y agoHow much of a role did licensing fees play and how much of a role the desire of management to “be modern”? An Office suite is the perfect example of a software that benefits greatly from the speed, usability, OS integration of a native application. Collaboration can easily be achieved with Box, SharePoint, etc. I’m sure there will be employee backlash
- ajcodez 9y agoAt a past consulting job the CEO claimed Google was reading his confidential information in the 00’s and refuses to use anything except Office 365. In his case confidence that MS will not act improperly is the most important feature.
- snewman 9y agoAs an engineer working on Docs and related products from inception through 2010: I would be astonished if this were the case. Had such behavior become known within the engineering team, there would likely have been an uprising. There was no backdoor mechanism for looking documents, at least on the Docs (word processing) side, and in any case this sort of thing Was Not Done. My guess is that things are locked down even more tightly now.
- ajcodez 9y agoI use Docs all the time. It's really nice to hear privacy is important to the team!
- golfer 9y agoSounds like a really paranoid CEO.
- sseth 9y agoInteresting. You would think the case of Alex Kibkalo would lead to the opposite conclusion. Microsoft prosecuted a blogger for piracy of Windows software after reading his private hotmail emails.
- kasperni 9y agoNo Microsoft fanboy, quite the contrary. But ended up installing Office 365 for my SOs business (~ 30 people) last year. And I'm properly impressed, by the amount of progress they do. It is a solid offering for very little money. Yes something like Teams (Slack Clone) might be feel a bit betaish. But they are starting to add features such as recording of meeting, automatic transcribing and inline message translation. I really think they are going to be hard to beat in the future.
- braderhart 9y agoYet they can't even support WebRTC for audio/video in Linux? They are still 5 to 10 years behind everyone else and are a dying company.
- JungleGymSam 9y agoUtter nonsense.
- pkaye 9y agoThe Google products are awesome in synchronization and collaboration between multiple users. Way better than the Microsoft Office 365.
- ebikelaw 9y agoI think the other commentators are really understating the extent to which Google beats Microsoft on realtime collaboration. In Office 365 you can see that someone else has opened the file but you can't see their changes until they Save which is hilariously retro. Google Docs doesn't even have a Save button. In Office if someone else makes a change and saves it you get a popup to merge their changes, or if you save you get a popup to merge your changes with their saves. That's garbage. In Google Docs you and I can edit the same _word_ or even the same character at the same time, with all changes reflected on both sides immediately. No saving, no syncing.
- __m 9y agoHow can we streamline industrial espionage?
- drumhead 9y agoI suspect that certain areas such as Finance might have an exemption from that rule.
- neovive 9y agoI think G-Suite found the sweet spot on what most users need from office productivity tools and enhanced it by doubling-down on collaboration. Regarding advanced usage, I just completed a G-Suite project that leveraged some of the advanced features of Google Sheets and was quite impressed. If you haven't done so already, test out the IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML, IMPORTRANGE, FILTER and QUERY (with group by and pivot) functions. You can build some very nice dashboards, pulling data from multiple sources (web, worksheets) and summarizing into one view. I'll admit that the syntax was peculiar at first, but once you get used to it, it's very powerful--even without App Script. As a web developer, IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML is actually pretty fun.
- interfixus 9y agoIt remains a fair stretch beyond my comprehension how anyone - individual or 100.000+ workforce corporation - could wish to lay their fate and data utterly in the hands of some third party entity.
- simonsarris 9y agoEither you've never actually built anything worthwhile or your sentiment approaches the people who say "I never trust anyone" without thinking about what that statement actually means. Car companies lay their fate of their passengers in third party tire companies and third party brake companies. Airplane companies lay their product's fate in the hands of third party engines. Airplane passengers lay their fate utterly in the hands of some third party pilot. Car drivers lay their fate in car companies and other drivers. Spreadsheets? Data? Whatever works best right now will do 99.9% of the time.
- interfixus 9y agoYes, clearly every social interaction is based on some level of trust. Your examples sort of state the obvious. The point is, I will not drive on shitty tires if I have a reasonable option of good ones. I will not knowingly fly with a drunk pilot if a sober one is available. Airbus - and nearly everyone I know - happily hand over ultimate control of their data trove to someone else, seemingly without any pressing grounds for doing so. And yes, I know that is the way of the world these days, however much I may bemoan it. Witness the snide and micro-agression even here on HN whenever someone dares to differ.
- mancerayder 9y agoNaïve question here: how is Google able to have Docs and Sheets without getting the crap sued out of them by Microsoft? In a similar way as the OpenOffice and similar reverse engineering efforts avoided getting attacked?
- ocdtrekkie 9y agoSued for... what exactly? Not only do Docs and Sheets have almost nothing in common with Office besides being... well, an office suite of some sort... Microsoft's DOCX and XLSX formats were offered up as a standard other developers can implement, so compatibility isn't a problem either.
- gbenzzz 9y agoI feel sorry for whomever has to administrate that. From an admin perspective, GSuite doesn't hold a candle to Exchange. What do you mean I can't forward a users email, set an OOO reply, or give full access without logging in as the user!?