4 ms·

Is there real competition in the front-office / back-office "alternate devices" space? There are certainly niche players but at least at the $bigcos I've worked

by bri3d 9y ago

Is there real competition in the front-office / back-office "alternate devices" space? There are certainly niche players but at least at the $bigcos I've worked at, most "real" tasks aren't easily accomplished on a tablet, phone, or Chromebook. Web spreadsheets tend to be feature-incomplete, presentation and document creation is a mess, and that's not even starting in on the hundreds of proprietary front-office tools for appointment scheduling and client management and back-office tools for analytics and finance, which are strongly Windows-based. I've only seen a few people use tablets day-to-day and they're all mid-to-upper level execs whose jobs are far more delegation-and-communication oriented and who have the liberty of sending someone an email when they need "the numbers" pulled or a slide presentation whipped together. Even the BigCos I've worked at who use GSuite have had an additional subscription to Office365 for employees who need Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. I've seen very few larger companies who can subsist on Google Sheets alone. This could be something that changes in the next 5-10 years, certainly, but it's been a prophecy that's underdelivered for years. Kind of feels like the "year of Linux on the desktop" all over again.

pavs 9y ago
Airbus with 130,000 employees is moving to gsuite. https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-picks-another-win-g-suite-airbus-grounds-microsoft-office/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-picks-another-win-g-sui...
- Vulkum 9y ago
  Only in part. The part of Airbus that deals with confidential information [1] will stay on the Microsoft stack for a while (at least for e-mails). [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/sorry_microsoft_haters_airbus_isnt_killing_office_entirely/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/sorry_microsoft_hat...
  - pavs 9y ago
    I think it's fair to assume that moving so many users to a new platform (new to the users) - will take some time and getting used to. Email being one of the biggest pain points. If anything, such a large migration from software suite to another is most likely very rare. So probably begs the question why would a company do something like this if there isn't obvious benefit of doing this. Since I haven't used Microsoft products in a long time, I can't tell gsuite is vastly superior, other than very specialized edge cases for excel and word. For most people, it probably is more than good enough and not worth the extra money or (presumably) worse user experience.
mattferderer 9y ago
I've worked with Office 365 & helped setup & admin several GSuite businesses. GSuite is a nice light alternative. It's online Office apps seem to trump Office 365's online Office apps but the desktop version that comes with most Office 365 subscriptions is in a league of its own. You have to purchase GSuite plugin after plugin to try & replace its capabilities.
- bonesss 9y ago
  I think if you're trying to replace user-facing Excel, Access, or Word usage of a meaningful sort with anything but other specialized tool is a fools errand. At the same time: GSuite is leagues better, more intuitive, homogenous, more collaborative, friendlier to sysadmins, and friendlier to document-based data manipulation. It's also more than "good enough" for the 99% use cases of PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Paint, etc. GSuite for all, Thick Old Office for the accountants and data crunchers who need it, all docs on Google Drive... why not? O365 is kinda ok (things that should work dont, the split between online and offline is ass, the tools are heavy, the collaboration is semi-hidden), but it's the sharepoint and up-selling of Azure services that make it kinda Evil. I think a hybrid approach preserves the moral high ground and best-tool-for-the-job.
AFNobody 9y ago
I worked at two GSuite companies that handed out Chromebooks to the outside Sales team. Automated Google Sheet reports, easy to maintain organizational documentation. One was acquired by a S&P 509 and forced to convert to O365. The CFO quietly carved out an exception in the budget citing "conversion costs" so Accounting and Sales don't have to convert.
- bonesss 9y ago
  That is a highly interesting comparison... Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over. I think the automation and Enterprise document management story in GSuite is just better than the Sharepoint nightmare and heavyweight knowledge-graph approach of O365. I think going over to O365 would be a lot harder than the opposite, for an advanced user, thanks to how automation works on those platforms...
  - AFNobody 9y ago
    > Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over. Correct and in this case, that was exactly what happened except with the GSuite benefiting. There was a number of Google Sheets that were automatically populated by database queries on an hourly basis. These were regularly viewed by the L1s (such as daily orders, distribution statistics, accounting summaries) and the Sales team (who wanted to know their commissions ASAP daily). Then you had a bunch of managers who used those sheets to do light analysis with macro magic.
ksec 9y ago
>"real" tasks aren't easily accomplished on a tablet, phone, or Chromebook. I have been thinking would this means the return of Desktop. The combination of Desktop + Tablet, instead of Laptop.

by bri3d 9y ago

pavs 9y ago

Airbus with 130,000 employees is moving to gsuite. https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-picks-another-win-g-suite-airbus-grounds-microsoft-office/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-picks-another-win-g-sui...

Vulkum 9y ago
Only in part. The part of Airbus that deals with confidential information [1] will stay on the Microsoft stack for a while (at least for e-mails). [1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/sorry_microsoft_haters_airbus_isnt_killing_office_entirely/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/19/sorry_microsoft_hat...
- pavs 9y ago
  I think it's fair to assume that moving so many users to a new platform (new to the users) - will take some time and getting used to. Email being one of the biggest pain points. If anything, such a large migration from software suite to another is most likely very rare. So probably begs the question why would a company do something like this if there isn't obvious benefit of doing this. Since I haven't used Microsoft products in a long time, I can't tell gsuite is vastly superior, other than very specialized edge cases for excel and word. For most people, it probably is more than good enough and not worth the extra money or (presumably) worse user experience.

mattferderer 9y ago

I've worked with Office 365 & helped setup & admin several GSuite businesses. GSuite is a nice light alternative. It's online Office apps seem to trump Office 365's online Office apps but the desktop version that comes with most Office 365 subscriptions is in a league of its own. You have to purchase GSuite plugin after plugin to try & replace its capabilities.

bonesss 9y ago
I think if you're trying to replace user-facing Excel, Access, or Word usage of a meaningful sort with anything but other specialized tool is a fools errand. At the same time: GSuite is leagues better, more intuitive, homogenous, more collaborative, friendlier to sysadmins, and friendlier to document-based data manipulation. It's also more than "good enough" for the 99% use cases of PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Paint, etc. GSuite for all, Thick Old Office for the accountants and data crunchers who need it, all docs on Google Drive... why not? O365 is kinda ok (things that should work dont, the split between online and offline is ass, the tools are heavy, the collaboration is semi-hidden), but it's the sharepoint and up-selling of Azure services that make it kinda Evil. I think a hybrid approach preserves the moral high ground and best-tool-for-the-job.

AFNobody 9y ago

I worked at two GSuite companies that handed out Chromebooks to the outside Sales team. Automated Google Sheet reports, easy to maintain organizational documentation. One was acquired by a S&P 509 and forced to convert to O365. The CFO quietly carved out an exception in the budget citing "conversion costs" so Accounting and Sales don't have to convert.

bonesss 9y ago
That is a highly interesting comparison... Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over. I think the automation and Enterprise document management story in GSuite is just better than the Sharepoint nightmare and heavyweight knowledge-graph approach of O365. I think going over to O365 would be a lot harder than the opposite, for an advanced user, thanks to how automation works on those platforms...
- AFNobody 9y ago
  > Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over. Correct and in this case, that was exactly what happened except with the GSuite benefiting. There was a number of Google Sheets that were automatically populated by database queries on an hourly basis. These were regularly viewed by the L1s (such as daily orders, distribution statistics, accounting summaries) and the Sales team (who wanted to know their commissions ASAP daily). Then you had a bunch of managers who used those sheets to do light analysis with macro magic.

ksec 9y ago

>"real" tasks aren't easily accomplished on a tablet, phone, or Chromebook. I have been thinking would this means the return of Desktop. The combination of Desktop + Tablet, instead of Laptop.