7 ms·
MS Office isn't "banned" from employees' computers at Google. If you need it (and some do) you must request it specifically, because it costs Google a nontrivia
by enneff 6y ago
MS Office isn't "banned" from employees' computers at Google. If you need it (and some do) you must request it specifically, because it costs Google a nontrivial amount of money for every user. Same thing with any piece of commercial software: for example, I have Adobe Photoshop on my Google laptop, and I had to request it because it costs Google a few hundred bucks, and most people don't need it at all.
Before Google Docs existed, many employees used MS Office, and when Docs was being rolled out Googlers were incentivized to switch to Docs by being offered kudos, swag, etc (ie, the carrot, not the stick).
- jiggawatts 6y ago> because it costs Google a nontrivial amount of money for every user. Google is the fourth biggest public company in the world as measured by market cap. A Microsoft 365 "E3" license is $20/user/month. They can afford it. This restriction is entirely about eating your own dogfood.
- m1sta_ 6y agoThey have 103,000 employees. It adds up.
- tartuffe78 6y agoThat's only $24 million per year /s
- byteshock 6y agoJust because Google has a lot of money doesn’t mean they’ll go wasting it on software licenses. 24 million might not even come close to what they make per year, but they still have to be considerate on what they spend their money on.
- Operyl 6y agoJust because I don’t know if you’re aware, the parent comment has a “/s” which means they’re saying it sarcastically. They agree with you most likely.
- Spooky23 6y agoIt’s an exception, it’s not about ability to afford.
- xyzzyz 6y ago$20/user/month is tens of millions of dollars every year for Google. Sure, they can afford it, but I'm quite sure they have better things to spend money on.
- mrits 6y ago"Google is the fourth biggest public company" -- That's exactly why they wouldn't want 365 company wide
- enneff 6y agoYes, we can afford it, and that's why if you want MS Office you click a button on a web page and get it immediately. But why would we throw away money by having it installed by default?
- soup10 6y agoCan you guys stop astroturfing here. Nobody is dumb enough to believe that Google is saving money by not using office.
- arcticfox 6y ago> Nobody is dumb enough to believe that Google is saving money by not using office. Maybe I'm dumb, why wouldn't they be saving money by not paying for Office? Obviously they could buy it for every employee, including the majority that don't need it, but why? They could also just light money on fire (but why?)?
- soup10 6y agoOffice is business productivity software. You don't buy it for every employee, you negotiate a license for the number of seats in use. It has way more features than google docs and is standard everywhere. It's like saying you could save money by having programmers write code on pencil and paper. You saved the money on the computer but you have a net loss because you lost the power and efficiency of real time editing, compiling and debugging. These corporate guys just drink the internal koolaid/spin from hr or whatever and come here repeating nonsense as if its fact and it annoys me. It's dogfooding with some minor privacy/security concerns since microsoft is competitor, we get it, just call it what it is and move on.
- briandear 6y ago> It has way more features than google docs and is standard everywhere I work for another FAANG and we don’t use MS Word. It certainly isn’t “standard” for us. It’s not standard for two of the three FAANG companies, so “everywhere” is inaccurate. Being popular isn’t the same thing as standard. Pages is a far more usable for the vast majority of use cases. Most people aren’t creating extremely complicated word processing documents in their day-to-day. Word is a bloated mess. Keynote is far easier and more elegant than PowerPoint. Excel however certainly shines for big spreadsheet work, but for most spreadsheet work Numbers and the google spreadsheet are perfectly fine.
- mehrdada 6y agoI'd seriously doubt more than a few of people at Google would want to use 365 at work. I for one never felt the need when I was there nor afterwards and the entire company is fully utilizing Google Docs which is a better product as far as sharing and search is concerned. It's not like people at Google constantly email .docx files to each other, lol. Nevertheless, you can request it (in an AppStore like fashion, not some overburdened process) if you really need MSOffice, but Zoom binary being banned seems to be a completely different matter though, as pointed out in other posts.
- lonelappde 6y agoDocs is good at sharing and searching, but bad at editing. Anything over a few pages brings a workstation to its knees.
- mehrdada 6y agoFor workplace collaboration, sharing is the highlight, not formatting (unless you're designing for paper-based publication). I have to say the few times I encountered the browser-based Word 356, it felt like total shit. Cannot imagine anyone really using it if they have the desktop app installed. Seems like a checkmark product and the real users end up using the full app version. I've even heard this from friends at Microsoft.
- coffeeling 6y agoFrom what I've tried the desktop apps themselves do cloud-driven collab just fine, so I don't really see a reason to use a browser app when native's available. May just be me seeing things, but the native-to-native sync seems faster than with the web apps. Sadly that means sharing is a bit less convenient than just click link to open.
- panarky 6y ago> because it costs Google a nontrivial amount of money It's not just the money it's also additional security vulns to defend.
- rossjudson 6y agoI haven't once thought, "Gee, I really wish I could use Microsoft Word". I have thought, "there's a capability I wish I had in Docs" a few times. I did most of my doc writing in LyX before Google, though.
- enneff 6y agoI imagine most people who want MS Office over Google Docs probably want it for Excel, which IIUC as several powerful features not present in Google's Sheets.
- philliphaydon 6y agoThe only thing Google Docs has over MS is the collaboration. Word in the browser is a billion times better for formatting than Google Docs. I loath using google docs. But when it comes to Collab, Google docs wins hands down.
- shbooms 6y ago> The only thing Google Docs has over MS is the collaboration. As someone who has had to build relatively complex tools in both Sheets and Excel, I would have to say Sheets has done a much more impressive job with their builtin formulas/functions than Excel.
- philliphaydon 6y agoI can't comment on that because I rarely use Sheets or Excel. I think my usage of Sheets is `=SUM...` :D
- enneff 6y agoThen I'm not sure why you're replying to my comment about Excel. :-)
- 6y ago