15 ms·

> 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

by 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.
        elbear 10mo ago
        Likely because some people don't like to hear about positive experiences with LLMs.
  - dabockster 10mo ago
    I think it is economically viable but we as devs have to realize our true worth here beyond just a paycheck.
  - kleinishere 10mo ago
    Link to blog post? Didn’t see it on quick look at your site.
  - RHSeeger 10mo ago
    > It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse. > not economical viable I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
    - protocolture 10mo ago
      >Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse. I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck. The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat. He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed. Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.
- the__alchemist 10mo ago
  > And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder. Cross-platform compatibility is trivial with modern tooling IMO.
  - longor1996 10mo ago
    On the surface level, building/compiling/running, maybe... But properly integrating with a given platform (or hell, version of platform!) is a whole new world of pain. :(
- Den_VR 10mo ago
  The talent that would do such a thing gets acquihired while the competition meets an early end.
- rprend 10mo ago
  There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
  - shiroiuma 10mo ago
    There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope. Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
    - xstas1 10mo ago
      They're working on it.
      - vee-kay 10mo ago
        Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose. Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads. The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers. Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.
        shiroiuma 10mo ago
        They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do. A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits. And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
- snarfy 10mo ago
  Outside of any engineering issues there are a plethora of regulatory and compliance barriers. I think this is actually a much bigger issue than lack of developers.
- aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
  > > Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. > 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. I think the problem is different: those who are capable of pulling off such a task commonly lack the "business credibility" that is necessary so that C-level executives would buy a product from them. Getting the skills in all these disciplines is a much-more-than-fulltime job. If you spend all your time cramming, you simply don't have time to build this "business credibility".
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.

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.
      - elbear 10mo ago
        Likely because some people don't like to hear about positive experiences with LLMs.
- dabockster 10mo ago
  I think it is economically viable but we as devs have to realize our true worth here beyond just a paycheck.
- kleinishere 10mo ago
  Link to blog post? Didn’t see it on quick look at your site.
- RHSeeger 10mo ago
  > It's just not possible (and maybe not economical viable) to build enough software to make everything not suck. Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse. > not economical viable I think that's part of the key. Nobody wants to pay for great software
  - protocolture 10mo ago
    >Honestly, it's been my experience that there's no motivation to do this, either. Many of the people that buy the software are more interested in a shiny, new button than they are in making sure all the existing buttons do what they want. And they each want a _different_ shiny, new button... and too many (barely functional) features just makes a product worse. I was working at a particular organisation 13 years ago, and we were tired. Everything was a half completed project. Everything needed work. One of the file servers was busted. We had cobbled together enough to make the customer experience ok, but the guts were on the deck. The organisation expanded, hired a new CTO, moved the old Pseudo CTO to an architect role. New CTO sat down with everyone in the team for a 1 on 1 chat. He asked what the biggest issue was, I said we needed time to fix everything and make it work. He said everyone on the team told him the same thing. That we have a solid environment and it just needs to be completed. Next day he announces a shift to the cloud. We had all our priorities suspended as we forced 365 and Azure into everything. I bailed like 3 weeks later.
the__alchemist 10mo ago
> And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder. Cross-platform compatibility is trivial with modern tooling IMO.
- longor1996 10mo ago
  On the surface level, building/compiling/running, maybe... But properly integrating with a given platform (or hell, version of platform!) is a whole new world of pain. :(
Den_VR 10mo ago
The talent that would do such a thing gets acquihired while the competition meets an early end.
rprend 10mo ago
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
- shiroiuma 10mo ago
  There's a bunch of competitors to MS Office already: Libre/OpenOffice, Google Docs, Collabora, etc. Some of these are totally free to use, some open-source too. Have people switched en masse to them? Nope. Personally, I think MS needs to massively increase their prices here: they're leaving a lot of money on the table. Companies, especially, (and governments) just aren't going to switch, no matter what. So why not increase the prices ten-fold?
  - xstas1 10mo ago
    They're working on it.
    - vee-kay 10mo ago
      Starting with the ads. Windows 11 was launched for precisely this purpose. Because what better way to milk daily revenue from existing millions of Windows PCs than to show desktop-level ads. The actual product price increases are an added boost to the M$ coffers. Microsoft thinks that most students/home users will not run away instead to Linux and OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and maybe it's right, since they had decades to do so.
      - shiroiuma 10mo ago
        They are right, but they're too slow in realizing this. I of course switched to Linux decades ago, but for ages now, I've constantly heard people swearing "this is the last straw Microsoft! I'm going to switch to Linux!" because of some transgression and then they never do. A few people might convert, but tightening the screws on the rest of them will by far more than make up for the ones they lose. MS needs to make the most of this and raise prices enormously, 10-100 times what they are now. Even if 5% of users defect, a 10x price increase will still mean a 9.5x increase in profits. And they might as well bake some more ads and other malware into Windows and Office too, while they're at it, to increase profits even more. They're missing out on a lot of profit by not putting more ads into their corporate products especially. Sure, people will complain, but so what? The users don't make the purchasing decisions at companies anyway, so who cares about pissing them off?
snarfy 10mo ago
Outside of any engineering issues there are a plethora of regulatory and compliance barriers. I think this is actually a much bigger issue than lack of developers.
aleph_minus_one 10mo ago
> > Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. > 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. I think the problem is different: those who are capable of pulling off such a task commonly lack the "business credibility" that is necessary so that C-level executives would buy a product from them. Getting the skills in all these disciplines is a much-more-than-fulltime job. If you spend all your time cramming, you simply don't have time to build this "business credibility".

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.