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My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. The odds of us ever leaving this platform are slim-to-none. Microsoft has really hit a
by tammer 9y ago
My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. The odds of us ever leaving this platform are slim-to-none. Microsoft has really hit a powerful long-term business model.
The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing. We're buying them anyway so no matter what Google offers us they can't beat the cost savings Microsoft can provide. Same with AWS vs Azure — we can use our volume licensing in the cloud with Azure where with other providers we'd have to pay through the nose.
Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. And I think that disruption will take quite a while.
- comportboy 9y ago> My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. Your job is at Microsoft. At least you're doing a great marketing job here.
- citilife 9y agoAt the massive institution I work at, we recently went all-in on O365 18 months ago and are now switching to Google (over the next 12 months). So perhaps, but the room for change seems to be evident.
- judge2020 9y agoOne issue currently preventing our move is the lack of a true desktop app. Sometimes you just need the native windows experience instead of your browser taking up even more ram to open a spreadsheet.
- abritinthebay 9y agoFor email? Yet to find a situation that requires it.
- hug 9y agoThe answer to this is fairly simple: Offline access to email. You need a client for this, and an arbitrary browser won't do. Solved problem on iOS and Android with whatever mail app you want to use, but those are of course apps. Solved problem on the PC with Outlook or "Gmail Offline", but "Gmail Offline" is a chrome-only feature so is, as far as I'm concerned, an offline email client built into Chrome, not a feature of Gmail per-se. See also: Any IMAP mail client.
- abritinthebay 9y agoAn arbitrary client won’t do either. It would have to be a specific one. So now that we’ve removed the need for an arbitrary client in both cases why can’t localStorage/etc solve this to most users satisfaction?
- mastazi 9y agoDesktop email clients like Outlook let you do things such as: select all email messages -> save as .txt -> feed the .txt to a python script that extracts useful data. If we were using GSuite I guess we could use the Gmail API to get the message body data, but at the end of the day having local access is just more convenient (edit: faster). Edit: for everything else that is not email (spreadsheet, word processor, presentations) there are also similar advantages related to having full fledged desktop applications.
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoInteresting use case. What exactly are you extracting from email that you’d need a python script for computing?
- mastazi 9y agoWe do clustering on unstructured text and we output data in a Jupyter notebook. It's a proof of concept for now and the production pipeline will be a bit different. The whole Python ecosystem is awesome for this type of prototyping.
- rubidium 9y agoAnd that you couldn't easily do with Microsoft flow and office 365?
- mastazi 9y agoSee my response to parent
- braderhart 9y agoHave you never heard of LibreOffice? Google Drive and alternatives automatically can convert to open document format. It is pretty common. Surprised you never heard of it before.
- smogcutter 9y agoNot to mention that sheets is far from a replacement for excel.
- radium3d 9y agoMay I ask what you do with Excel that you cannot do with sheets?
- paulddraper 9y agoI'm sure the actual list is long, but I'd be happy if I could tweak graphs appearance, or do polynomial regression.
- purple-again 9y agoLibreoffice and Sheets are both dead in the water non starters for all of the finance guys that I know. The ability to open a million line csv file with 75 columns and execute a search and replace without leaking battery acid out of every orifice in your machine. The hundreds of long complex well vetted plug ins that are drop and play with Excel which serve niche hard to reason about corners of regulation legalese. There has been so much cross pollination between the major firms that everybody has these tools and implements their own little tweaks. The ability to quickly spin up a VBA macro to do some heavy lifting in a client provided 250 worksheet workbook each with 50000 line items (none escape quoted so every address with a comma in it malformed the data on client export).
- Pxtl 9y agoThe CSV support in Excel is a nightmare. And it still does moronic destructive things if it mistakes anything you're doing for a date.
- olavgg 9y agoThat is my experience too, and I also find LibreOffice to be much faster than Excel for huge datasets. The biggest difference for me is clearly file compatibility and that is why I still use mostly Excel.
- adamb_ 9y agoAbsolutely. Sometimes you just want to output a quick CSV, open it locally in familiar spreadsheet environment, and explore.
- spydum 9y agowe did a similar thing. nobody can figure out why. gsuite is cool for a couple hundred people, when you dont want to pay for office licenses for everyone. it makes even less sense when you already do. there is a serious productivity delta between gsuite and o365, especially if you are like 90% of the other companies where Excel is king (no, sheets is not a suitable stand-in).
- skj 9y agoFYI Google used gsuite internally for its 20k-or-whatever engineers and, in my opinion, it works fantastically. (I'm a Google engineer)
- spydum 9y agoCollab tools are fabulous no doubt, but sheets feels entirely neglected and basic. Permissions model is clunky and gsuite governance is nonexistent - you have to buy a CASB license to do anything effectively. It's not a bad suite, I just think it's confused on some areas (don't even get me started on the chat/conference systems tho)
- tomnipotent 9y agoI'll bet money that accounting & finance teams at Google use Excel.
- nimchimpsky 9y agolol. Tru dat. Excel is a beast.
- rootsudo 9y agoHow do we find this out?
- intended 9y agoEmpirically we buy a company, tell the accounting team that we are changing to gsuite and see if the CTO gets fired, or the accounting team quits, or the company gets a hit. IF neither, Gsuite is ok.
- zeth___ 9y agoNever under estimate the capability of the C-suite to create busy work for everyone in the name of corporate vision.
- philliphaydon 9y agoI wish we were using O365, we are stuck on Google and its horrid. Google Docs is literally the worst thing in the world if you're not a chrome user.
- mrb 9y agoWord works best on Windows. Google Doc works best on Chrome. It's totally expected that if you go with the vendor's full stack, things will run better. I've worked—at Google—extensively on documents using Google Docs on a Chromebook and the experience is pretty smooth.
- philliphaydon 9y agoO365 works great on Firefox in any OS. GDoc sucks on any browser that isn't Chrome. The most frustrating thing is that GDoc's is the only app I'm aware of that doesn't support right click / copy-paste from the context menu in any browser other than Chrome. That annoys me the most.
- laken 9y agoMicrosoft’s Office Online (their version of Google Docs) has the same behavior on Firefox with right click clipboard functions as GDocs, unfortunately.
- IBM 9y agoAWS should partner with Apple (like all their other enterprise partnerships) to hawk iOS and Mac devices as a complete solution. Although it would only really work if AWS goes further up the stack from IaaS.
- bluedino 9y agoCompanies have so much fear when it comes to email. We've been on Rackspace Hosted Exchange for almost a decade. The plan is to move to O365 this year. And to get it directly from Microsoft, and roll our Office licenses into it. We get Office + email for just a hair more than we pay now, and we don't have to deal with the dinks at Rackspace when we have issues with it. I'm sure Microsoft support isn't perfect, but why go through a middleman.
- enraged_camel 9y agoWe use Rackspace as well, and their support is excellent - much better at supporting Microsoft products than Microsoft support itself, actually.
- gumaflux 9y agoWhich product is that?
- enraged_camel 9y agoSorry, the context here is Microsoft Exchange, which is what the parent is talking about.
- paulie_a 9y agoOutside of incredibly expensive corporate contracts does Microsoft actually support their products? That would honestly be news to me.
- hobs 9y agoIf you want support for their software in production, get ready to pay for it, and generally, it's great. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/support-options-for-business https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/support-options-for-b... Professional Support Single Incident $499 USD for one incident Professional Support 5-Pack $1999 USD for five incidents
- joseakle 9y agoThat sounds like anti competitive pricing all over again. Bundling Windows with a cloud subscription. Will it call for anti-trust action?
- acdanger 9y agoI also work for a massive institution with around 50,000 employees, a large portion of whom are Windows users. It was just announced within the last couple of months that we will be switching from Microsoft Office to Google. It seems like a massive undertaking to me and I’m not entirely sure of the reasoning behind it, but it is safe to say cost is front and center.
- sheetjs 9y agoThe looming threat to Windows is the post-"PC" device space. The mobile Office offerings on iOS definitely leave much to be desired, and there's an opening for a "mobile-first" approach to data that extends to the future of human-computer interfaces
- untog 9y agoWho is working in a "mobile-first" office, though? Last I saw, almost everyone is still working in an office where people use PCs - some with Macbooks, perhaps, but still not many. The mobile use case for Office is making quick changes to a document or reading something you've been sent, not your everyday work.
- leereeves 9y agoIs there serious competition for Office in the post-PC device space? I love my iPad for entertainment but I can't imagine doing any real work on an iPad.
- endorphone 9y agoUntil Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. Windows is under enormous threat, and much of our computing now takes place on alternate devices. The example of O365 is the perfect example, that platform being equally usable across many platforms (because it had to to have any market influence). And if Microsoft is just discounting everything to get your business, that doesn't support the theory of Microsoft dominance. It is yesteryear trying to desperately hang on to have relevance. That is not an example of why Microsoft is a 1T company, but is an example of why the future doesn't look so hot.
- shitloadofbooks 9y agoIf you do enough volume with ANY vendor (AWS, GCP, Red Hat, Dell, Cisco) they'll offer you discounts.
- bonesss 9y agoMy issue isn't the discounting, it's the discounting on things that require large addition investments to get working 'properly' in a modern context, and large ongoing investments into that same suppliers ecosystem. Office "needs" Sharepoint. Lots of Sharepoint and automation "needs" BizTalk. Neither of these are practically made to be customer managed, both require armies of external (MS partnered...), consultants. This implicit subscription to supplier monotheism undermines correct business decisions and creates economic impedence against correct business action. Sharecropping has never been a good fit for businesses who need to lead.
- AceJohnny2 9y ago> And if Microsoft is just discounting everything to get your business, that doesn't support the theory of Microsoft dominance. Microsoft has always discounted everything for volume licensing. That's how they lock you in.
- Analemma_ 9y agoHardly any enterprise software companies don’t discount for volume licensing. This is a standard business model, not some sinister Microsoft plot.
- hug 9y ago> The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing Like Microsoft 365, which is a superset of Office 365, and includes Windows licensing for desktops, along with the other "nice to haves" from the Azure AD premium suite, like Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and the Enterprise Mobility suite stuff. Oh, and an OMA DM compliant MDM suite with DLP and ... I work in this space, and it seems like the "365" suite is rapidly becoming an incredibly well integrated kitchen-sink approach to end-users software & devices.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- justonepost 9y agoYay bundling, the last resort of the scurvy monopolies
- WalterGR 9y ago"Last resort" for what, 30 years?
- MichaelMoser123 9y ago> Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. Microsoft is its own worst enemy - Windows usability has been going down the drain in recent years (is it possible that the desktop has been neglected due to the new emphasize on enterprise and the cloud?), and people get used to alternative OS's via Android.
- FigmentEngine 9y agoyou misunderstand 'ever' with computing the mistake is that it is somehow different to trains..
- juliendorra 9y agoI know an organization that switched to Office365 some time ago— from Google Entreprise / G suite: Some people do use Google tools on the side, using personal accounts for collaborating on documents (presentations, docs). They don’t necessarily know the organization was using them before, it’s like they’re bringing them inside as a new tool. Many exchange many MS Office words via e-mail (using desktop email clients). People use WeTransfer for sharing files internally or with contractors. People used to use Google Drive for sharing static files and it seems that this shared drive usage stopped and that people are not using OneDrive, relying on email and wetransfer. (I would not be surprised if some team Slack exist somewhere or I’m pretty sure many use their Facebook messengers to send quick links and references) As far as I know, the only consistently used Office365 tools are Mail and Calendar. Office365 doesn’t seem to induce the same collaborative patterns that Google Drive induce at all. Mostly it feels communication and collaboration are like 10 years or more ago: email is king, versioning is absent, and people use external tools when they feel it’s quicker and better (at odd with the organization policies of course) PS: I’ll add that all of my students are used to Google Drive tools, using Docs and Presentations regularly. It grew progressively over the year, and now it’s very rare to encounter a student who never used Google Drive. I teach to 150+ students each year, so I’d say it’s representative of a new wave of professionals who take real-time collaborative tools for granted (and will be sorely disappointed by tools and process in the organizations they’re about to join)
- sleepychu 9y agoThat's par for the course though. I used linux almost exclusively at Uni. I've never worked at a large org that deploys linux (even at the comparative cost) because Windows provides them with the domain tools they need.
- cc81 9y agoMicrosoft seems to be working very hard to get people to collaborate using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites for the projects you are involved in the office. They also seem to invest pretty heavily in making in a developer platform so you can extend it. https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph (and as you can see from the picture of the developer it is very hip)
- hellofunk 9y agoI just noticed that One Drive includes 1 TB of cloud storage -- compare that to the 30 GB we get with Google's business suite. No wonder all our employees also have a separate Dropbox subscription. That's a cost savings to get something like lots of cloud storage in addition to office applications -- it's more of a Dropbox + Google replacement. I wonder if in practice it is as nice as Dropbox + Google.
- ktta 9y agoI don't think this will change things since people don't want to take a risk, but google doesn't enforce the 30GB limit. It's pretty much 'unlimited'. The hammer can come down any time though.
- rbanffy 9y agoYou make an excellent point wrt discounts. We are often puzzled by unsound technical choices that make little sense until you realize the decision is not an isolated event. Everything makes sense. If it doesn't, it's because you are missing something.