9 ms·

Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also

by amanzi 10mo ago

Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on. Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible. Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/microsoft-365-plans-and-pricing https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic... And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...

wvenable 10mo ago
> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
- dabockster 10mo ago
  > Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order. And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
  - wvenable 10mo ago
    I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally. Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
    - discreteevent 10mo ago
      Do you think that LLMs will do much to help to alleviate this?
      - wvenable 10mo ago
        I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks. That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work. But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
        discreteevent 10mo ago
        Thanks for your honest opinion. Not sure why you were downvoted.
        MrBuddyCasino 10mo ago
        I don’t get it either. I feel people are increasingly knee-jerk about downvoting, triggered by certain phrases, perhaps „vibe-coding“ in this case.
- bluedino 10mo ago
  How did it get this way? A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember. Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications. It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
  - wvenable 10mo ago
    As much as everyone complains about Microsoft Office the historic alternatives were all much worse and eventually all collapsed under their own weight. Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - simonjgreen 10mo ago
    It’s the horizontal integration across Entra, not the Office experience, that is the lock in
    - pantulis 10mo ago
      This! It’s of course a lock in, but a very important feature for governance, nonetheless.
- the__alchemist 10mo ago
  You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.
  - doubled112 10mo ago
    Microsoft 365 isn't just the office suite though. It's the office suite, email, PIM, chat, wiki/collaboration, document management, and a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applications_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applicat...
    - amanzi 10mo ago
      Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.
      - abakker 10mo ago
        and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.
        doubled112 10mo ago
        Cheap is the same reason I ended up on an M365 family plan before they stopped allowing custom email domains. I'm grandfathered in, but I will probably end up paying more for just email when they decide to cancel the feature, plus needing to find a place to stash my off site backups.
- otterley 10mo ago
  It depends on your needs. Many businesses get along fine with Google Apps or Zoho.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- conception 10mo ago
  Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!” Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet. The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint. Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
  - bruce511 10mo ago
    Your analogy is apt, but can be extended a bit further to show why MS is so successful. Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered. Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland. You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price. Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.) I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days. The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way. And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
  - wvenable 10mo ago
    > This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet. Is there? Maybe Google docs. It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
    - 10mo ago
- chaostheory 10mo ago
  Zoho Office isn’t bad. It looks like a lot of the project planning SAAS are trying to take the crown too. It’s just strange that Google seemingly gave up.
  - crazygringo 10mo ago
    How did Google give up? Google Workspace is extremely popular with new features coming out constantly, used by tons of corporations. Is it just not on your radar or something?
    - chaostheory 10mo ago
      They don’t have customer support. Otherwise, they would make much larger inroads. Most businesses don’t want to take the risk migrating to paid Google services for that reason.
      - crazygringo 10mo ago
        That's wrong, I don't know where you're getting your information. Enterprise plans absolutely provide support, and I've never heard of that being a sticking point in migration to Google. Are you confusing it with the free consumer versions?
- ivan_gammel 10mo ago
  It is perfectly possible to run a company with at least 1k employees on non-MS stack, throwing a bone of Office apps to (small) legal and accounting teams, so that they approve the budget. I did that before.
- b3lvedere 10mo ago
  There are thousands of alternatives, but they are not connected as seamlessly like Microsoft would like to think you it all is. On Microsoft admin/entra/management webpages each weblink does something completely different, yet it provides a very convenient interface.
- zelphirkalt 10mo ago
  No one has developed a full alternative in one package. That's because some of the practices are really bad and shouldn't be solved the way the GP describes they are solved. Data stored in SharePoint, the worst MS tool ever maybe, is one example. O e wouldn't build another SharePoint, because why make something that sucks so much and then store data in it? It is moronic to do that. And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.
  - thewebguyd 10mo ago
    No one uses sharepoint because it's good or was ever good, everyone knows it sucks. They use it precisely because it's a) bundled with 365 already and b) already very well integrated into the rest of the entire ecosystem. No developer time is needed to get automations, external sharing with encryption, and any other numerous features. So sure, one wouldn't build another SharePoint on its own, but there's still room to build an entire package like M365 and do it right, and integrate solutions that don't suck. But no one does, because it's expensive as hell. Good luck building something just as comprehensive and integrated and selling it for a measly $22/user/month.
- crazygringo 10mo ago
  Google Workspace is the similar product. It does basically all the same stuff. Tons of companies use it instead. It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  An all in one? No, maybe Google Workspace. But for all those pieces you can get all that functionality from different vendors / open source projects. I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.
fungi 10mo ago
IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS
- vee-kay 10mo ago
  Reverse argument is true as well.. If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.
  - 7bit 10mo ago
    All software is vulnerable, so what you're saying is not true. The only reason the products you listed seem more vulnerable is because they are focused by malicious actors due to their popularity and hence, also more often in the news.
    - hsbauauvhabzb 10mo ago
      No, I think you’ll find certain legacy corporations have terrible codebases and very little incentive to fix it, because why fix what makes money and has no liability?
      - vee-kay 10mo ago
        Agreed. Naive people in corporations think Linux and other FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) can save them from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. woes. But the reality is that corporates have very less incentive to migrate to open-source alternatives. Because it would mean negligible/no support, less work and hence less staffing (senior management have to justify the staffing headcount somehow). FOSS solutions typically don't get proper (or in some cases, not even any) support from the solution makers (developer company/persons). Corporates thrive internally on liability (they always want to blame someone, easiest target are their IT staff), and thrive externally by trying to avoid liability. e.g., Big Pharma (Pfizer, sold hundreds of millions of COVID vaccines worldwide, after ensuring those target countries (including their own country) first gave them complete indemnity from any liability for the negative effects or lack of efficacy of the vaccines.
jmward01 10mo ago
Vendor lock-in has always been the product.
aryonoco 10mo ago
Same in Australia
jdietrich 10mo ago
To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.
- tonyhart7 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jack_tripper 10mo ago
    I think it's just that HN audiences is generally detached from the harsh reality of the "money people" who make these purchasing choices and are generally choosing the safe low friction option, that lets the business free to focus on product development and sales that are the core of business, rather than wasting resources on building and managing IT infra from FOSS scratch for the sake of avoiding $BIG_TECH. If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product. Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.
    - tonyhart7 10mo ago
      I also didn't understand where sentiment of the same industry that promote SaaS for their niche tool comes from like this is YC sponsored site, there is a tons of SaaS for niche toolkit that people sold,shares etc and now all of sudden they hate it when other people doing the same thing they do
      - 10mo ago
wodenokoto 10mo ago
This is why I’m surprised by headlines like this”nobody wants to by Microsoft’s AI” like, every corporate M365 user must be either considering it or already started the purchasing process.
- pjc50 10mo ago
  Like a lot of enterprise features, the actual users have hatred or indifference, but the purchasing carries on anyway.
- amanzi 10mo ago
  Yep, and a lot of the responses to those "nobody wants to by Microsoft's AI" articles seem to get confused with the annoying copilot buttons that are popping up everywhere, and the actual enterprise-AI features that MS are pushing. I've seen and heard of a lot of uptake in the M365 AI paid features, and they seem genuinely useful - you can build and publish agents that have access to internal documents, staff can ask copilot to summarise their last day's worth of emails, transcribe Teams meetings with summaries, etc, etc. All protected by the same controls that you already get with M365 (further locking you in!)
hexbin010 10mo ago
It's funny reading the child comments completely glossing over your comment and just suggesting using Zoho or Google Docs lol
- amanzi 10mo ago
  I know! Google *Workspace* is about the closest competitor to M365, but here in NZ I don't see any large orgs switching to it. There was one that I knew about it, but they switched back to M365 after a couple of years.
joe_the_user 10mo ago
OK, supposed Claude in X many years could write a drop in replacement for every single one of those things. Would you raise your rates in the meantime too?
baka367 10mo ago
Europe is doing a pretty good job on slowly veering off this addiction. Might be worth reaching out to them for knowledge sharing or two
- wqaatwt 10mo ago
  Is it? The whole thing about replacing MS with OpenOffice and the LibreOffice or etc. has been going on for decades in Europe. Usually it’s just talk or a few municipalities that try it and then silently revert back to MS soon after.
- ragebol 10mo ago
  Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein. The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-belastinggeheimen/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)
- pjc50 10mo ago
  Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Holstein-relies-on-Open-Source-and-saves-millions-11105459.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  Well Europe had better hope this is true, because we are heading to a future where US SaaS products should be treated with at least the same level of suspicion as those Israeli fleet management apps that keep turning up on Samsung Android devices. At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies. Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait. Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal). The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald-trump-civilisation-war-europe https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald...
willvarfar 10mo ago
I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same. Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?
- grishka 10mo ago
  Russia is definitely not the same. I suspect they are still largely using (pirated) Microsoft products but cloud services hosted abroad are a big no-no.
b3lvedere 10mo ago
"it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible." .. until it doesn't. There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible. There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365. Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users. The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.
- crazygringo 10mo ago
  > drug lord tactics to keep its users. What on earth are you talking about? Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. It's a huge logistical challenge, not because of anything Microsoft does, but just because they're different systems and migrating data and processes is inherently hard.
  - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
    > Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. To my knowledge, Google is a worse "data kraken" than Microsoft, so companies are very hesitant to switch to Google; in the companies' opinion such a switch would be a switch from "bad" to "horrific".
    - crazygringo 10mo ago
      I don't know what you're basing any of that on. I've never heard of such a thing. Like, on the lists of enterprise pros and cons of migrating from MS365 to Workspace, I've never once heard of that.
      - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
        > I don't know what you're basing any of that on. I've never heard of such a thing. Basically everybody in Germany calls Google (and other companies that spy immensely on users) a "Datenkrake" (data kraken) > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenkrake https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenkrake According to dict.cc "data kraken" is the English translation of "Datenkrake".
no_carrier 10mo ago
There was a time in the 90s when quite a number of governments were aware of this Microsoft problem and insisted on open formats, so that important govt records and data could be open down the track. It seems like all of that was forgotten and traded for 'convenience'.

by amanzi 10mo ago

wvenable 10mo ago

> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

dabockster 10mo ago
> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order. And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.
- wvenable 10mo ago
  I wrote a blog post about this. There is literally no end to the amount of software that could be produced for businesses. My job right is to write software for particular niche; we purchase all the major software and yet I will still never run out of software to build internally. Literally everything sucks right now because all industries are running a massive software deficit. It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. We are making do with the scraps we have.
  - discreteevent 10mo ago
    Do you think that LLMs will do much to help to alleviate this?
    - wvenable 10mo ago
      I just did a major refactor of a project to move it many versions up on a framework and whole process was effectively vibe coded. I'd estimate I did in a couple of days what would have taken a couple of weeks. That's good and expect that could be shaved down even more. I was spending most of time just waiting for it do the work. But I don't know if that fundamentally changes the situation or not. We've had steady improvements in developer technology for decades. Even pre-LLM, I'm building significantly more complicated applications now in less time than ever before. But as quickly as our developer technology improved, the demands on applications we build has gone up. I'm not sure even LLMs can outpace the demand for software.
      - discreteevent 10mo ago
        Thanks for your honest opinion. Not sure why you were downvoted.
        MrBuddyCasino 10mo ago
        I don’t get it either. I feel people are increasingly knee-jerk about downvoting, triggered by certain phrases, perhaps „vibe-coding“ in this case.
bluedino 10mo ago
How did it get this way? A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember. Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications. It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.
- wvenable 10mo ago
  As much as everyone complains about Microsoft Office the historic alternatives were all much worse and eventually all collapsed under their own weight. Companies that had a successful niche, like Lotus, failed to keep up.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
- simonjgreen 10mo ago
  It’s the horizontal integration across Entra, not the Office experience, that is the lock in
  - pantulis 10mo ago
    This! It’s of course a lock in, but a very important feature for governance, nonetheless.
the__alchemist 10mo ago
You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.
- doubled112 10mo ago
  Microsoft 365 isn't just the office suite though. It's the office suite, email, PIM, chat, wiki/collaboration, document management, and a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applications_and_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_365_applicat...
  - amanzi 10mo ago
    Exactly - that's what I was trying point out in my original comment. The desktop office apps are actually reasonably easy to swap out for a large portion of people. It's the rest of the M365 suite which is massive.
    - abakker 10mo ago
      and, its so cheap. there are alternatives for individual components, but nothing that comes close to being this low cost. And, the ultimate value is that if you buy a niche tool (like notion) then only people with licenses can use it. Everybody at the company has office, so it's easy to share/collaborate. You have to really commit to avoiding office at all if you're going to replace parts of it.
      - doubled112 10mo ago
        Cheap is the same reason I ended up on an M365 family plan before they stopped allowing custom email domains. I'm grandfathered in, but I will probably end up paying more for just email when they decide to cancel the feature, plus needing to find a place to stash my off site backups.
otterley 10mo ago
It depends on your needs. Many businesses get along fine with Google Apps or Zoho.
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
conception 10mo ago
Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!” Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet. The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint. Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.
- bruce511 10mo ago
  Your analogy is apt, but can be extended a bit further to show why MS is so successful. Imagine organizing a meal out for 5 people. Easy. Despite the vegan, gluten free, kosher, high protein, lactose intolerant, no-fish, only fish, carb free dietary requirements there are lots of places to choose from. You can even order from 5 places and get 5 meals delivered. Now do that for 50. Or 500. Or 50 000. Sooner or later you start going to buffets. Sooner or later the food becomes very bland. You judge your software purchase for yourself based on features and moral principles and likely price. Business doesn't really care about features. It does care about suppliers. It does care about the reliability of the supply chain. It doesn't care about price (at least not at the Windows / Office price point.) I've been a supplier to corporates. The paperwork (and commitment) is substantial. Insurances, liabilities, support levels, release procedures, accountability,,,, it goes on for days. The moat MS has, has nothing to do with software. Which is why that "better software" fails - because it is optimizing for one kind of "better" and business defines "better" another way. And no, nothing is "replaced easily" in the enterprise space. When 10000 people, scattered over 1000 locations, get all-new software, nothing about that is easy.
- wvenable 10mo ago
  > This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet. Is there? Maybe Google docs. It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
  - 10mo ago
chaostheory 10mo ago
Zoho Office isn’t bad. It looks like a lot of the project planning SAAS are trying to take the crown too. It’s just strange that Google seemingly gave up.
- crazygringo 10mo ago
  How did Google give up? Google Workspace is extremely popular with new features coming out constantly, used by tons of corporations. Is it just not on your radar or something?
  - chaostheory 10mo ago
    They don’t have customer support. Otherwise, they would make much larger inroads. Most businesses don’t want to take the risk migrating to paid Google services for that reason.
    - crazygringo 10mo ago
      That's wrong, I don't know where you're getting your information. Enterprise plans absolutely provide support, and I've never heard of that being a sticking point in migration to Google. Are you confusing it with the free consumer versions?
ivan_gammel 10mo ago
It is perfectly possible to run a company with at least 1k employees on non-MS stack, throwing a bone of Office apps to (small) legal and accounting teams, so that they approve the budget. I did that before.
b3lvedere 10mo ago
There are thousands of alternatives, but they are not connected as seamlessly like Microsoft would like to think you it all is. On Microsoft admin/entra/management webpages each weblink does something completely different, yet it provides a very convenient interface.
zelphirkalt 10mo ago
No one has developed a full alternative in one package. That's because some of the practices are really bad and shouldn't be solved the way the GP describes they are solved. Data stored in SharePoint, the worst MS tool ever maybe, is one example. O e wouldn't build another SharePoint, because why make something that sucks so much and then store data in it? It is moronic to do that. And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.
- thewebguyd 10mo ago
  No one uses sharepoint because it's good or was ever good, everyone knows it sucks. They use it precisely because it's a) bundled with 365 already and b) already very well integrated into the rest of the entire ecosystem. No developer time is needed to get automations, external sharing with encryption, and any other numerous features. So sure, one wouldn't build another SharePoint on its own, but there's still room to build an entire package like M365 and do it right, and integrate solutions that don't suck. But no one does, because it's expensive as hell. Good luck building something just as comprehensive and integrated and selling it for a measly $22/user/month.
crazygringo 10mo ago
Google Workspace is the similar product. It does basically all the same stuff. Tons of companies use it instead. It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.
giancarlostoro 10mo ago
An all in one? No, maybe Google Workspace. But for all those pieces you can get all that functionality from different vendors / open source projects. I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.

fungi 10mo ago

IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS

vee-kay 10mo ago
Reverse argument is true as well.. If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.
- 7bit 10mo ago
  All software is vulnerable, so what you're saying is not true. The only reason the products you listed seem more vulnerable is because they are focused by malicious actors due to their popularity and hence, also more often in the news.
  - hsbauauvhabzb 10mo ago
    No, I think you’ll find certain legacy corporations have terrible codebases and very little incentive to fix it, because why fix what makes money and has no liability?
    - vee-kay 10mo ago
      Agreed. Naive people in corporations think Linux and other FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) can save them from Microsoft, Oracle, etc. woes. But the reality is that corporates have very less incentive to migrate to open-source alternatives. Because it would mean negligible/no support, less work and hence less staffing (senior management have to justify the staffing headcount somehow). FOSS solutions typically don't get proper (or in some cases, not even any) support from the solution makers (developer company/persons). Corporates thrive internally on liability (they always want to blame someone, easiest target are their IT staff), and thrive externally by trying to avoid liability. e.g., Big Pharma (Pfizer, sold hundreds of millions of COVID vaccines worldwide, after ensuring those target countries (including their own country) first gave them complete indemnity from any liability for the negative effects or lack of efficacy of the vaccines.

jmward01 10mo ago

Vendor lock-in has always been the product.

aryonoco 10mo ago

Same in Australia

jdietrich 10mo ago

To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.

tonyhart7 10mo ago
[flagged]
- jack_tripper 10mo ago
  I think it's just that HN audiences is generally detached from the harsh reality of the "money people" who make these purchasing choices and are generally choosing the safe low friction option, that lets the business free to focus on product development and sales that are the core of business, rather than wasting resources on building and managing IT infra from FOSS scratch for the sake of avoiding $BIG_TECH. If your business is making and selling a new type of energy drink or gluten free bread, you're not gonna bat an eye on going all-in on Microsoft Office 365 and Azure for your IT infra so you can focus on the product. Same story on how even software-first companies like Google just default to using SAP for ERP and be done with it instead of trying to write their own solution for no benefit even if they technically could, why bother when they can just focus on doing what they know best, getting you to click on ads, and outsource the annoying boring part of the megacorp business to SAP.
  - tonyhart7 10mo ago
    I also didn't understand where sentiment of the same industry that promote SaaS for their niche tool comes from like this is YC sponsored site, there is a tons of SaaS for niche toolkit that people sold,shares etc and now all of sudden they hate it when other people doing the same thing they do
    - 10mo ago

wodenokoto 10mo ago

This is why I’m surprised by headlines like this”nobody wants to by Microsoft’s AI” like, every corporate M365 user must be either considering it or already started the purchasing process.

pjc50 10mo ago
Like a lot of enterprise features, the actual users have hatred or indifference, but the purchasing carries on anyway.
amanzi 10mo ago
Yep, and a lot of the responses to those "nobody wants to by Microsoft's AI" articles seem to get confused with the annoying copilot buttons that are popping up everywhere, and the actual enterprise-AI features that MS are pushing. I've seen and heard of a lot of uptake in the M365 AI paid features, and they seem genuinely useful - you can build and publish agents that have access to internal documents, staff can ask copilot to summarise their last day's worth of emails, transcribe Teams meetings with summaries, etc, etc. All protected by the same controls that you already get with M365 (further locking you in!)

hexbin010 10mo ago

It's funny reading the child comments completely glossing over your comment and just suggesting using Zoho or Google Docs lol

amanzi 10mo ago
I know! Google *Workspace* is about the closest competitor to M365, but here in NZ I don't see any large orgs switching to it. There was one that I knew about it, but they switched back to M365 after a couple of years.

joe_the_user 10mo ago

OK, supposed Claude in X many years could write a drop in replacement for every single one of those things. Would you raise your rates in the meantime too?

baka367 10mo ago

Europe is doing a pretty good job on slowly veering off this addiction. Might be worth reaching out to them for knowledge sharing or two

wqaatwt 10mo ago
Is it? The whole thing about replacing MS with OpenOffice and the LibreOffice or etc. has been going on for decades in Europe. Usually it’s just talk or a few municipalities that try it and then silently revert back to MS soon after.
ragebol 10mo ago
Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein. The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-belastinggeheimen/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)
pjc50 10mo ago
Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft. https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Holstein-relies-on-Open-Source-and-saves-millions-11105459.html https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...
exasperaited 10mo ago
Well Europe had better hope this is true, because we are heading to a future where US SaaS products should be treated with at least the same level of suspicion as those Israeli fleet management apps that keep turning up on Samsung Android devices. At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies. Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait. Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal). The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald-trump-civilisation-war-europe https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald...

willvarfar 10mo ago

I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same. Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?

grishka 10mo ago
Russia is definitely not the same. I suspect they are still largely using (pirated) Microsoft products but cloud services hosted abroad are a big no-no.

b3lvedere 10mo ago

"it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible." .. until it doesn't. There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible. There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365. Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users. The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.

crazygringo 10mo ago
> drug lord tactics to keep its users. What on earth are you talking about? Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. It's a huge logistical challenge, not because of anything Microsoft does, but just because they're different systems and migrating data and processes is inherently hard.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  > Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. To my knowledge, Google is a worse "data kraken" than Microsoft, so companies are very hesitant to switch to Google; in the companies' opinion such a switch would be a switch from "bad" to "horrific".
  - crazygringo 10mo ago
    I don't know what you're basing any of that on. I've never heard of such a thing. Like, on the lists of enterprise pros and cons of migrating from MS365 to Workspace, I've never once heard of that.
    - aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
      > I don't know what you're basing any of that on. I've never heard of such a thing. Basically everybody in Germany calls Google (and other companies that spy immensely on users) a "Datenkrake" (data kraken) > https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenkrake https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenkrake According to dict.cc "data kraken" is the English translation of "Datenkrake".

no_carrier 10mo ago

There was a time in the 90s when quite a number of governments were aware of this Microsoft problem and insisted on open formats, so that important govt records and data could be open down the track. It seems like all of that was forgotten and traded for 'convenience'.