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I once convinced a CEO of a company with a few hundred employees to move from Outlook to Gmail. For a while after I was a social pariah. My expense reports wo

I once convinced a CEO of a company with a few hundred employees to move from Outlook to Gmail. For a while after I was a social pariah. My expense reports would go missing (want to find a Microsoft fan? look in accounting). My calls to IT (staffed with MCWhatever certified individuals) unanswered. The controller pulled me aside and said in a menacing Brooklyn accent I didn't know he had in him, "I would appreciate it if you would make this go away." I learned a valuable about switching costs that day.

rubyrescue 14y ago
wow please tell more. "for a while" means people's anger passed? or you guys switched back?
- nostromo 14y ago
  I wasn't at the company for much longer after that. No, I wasn't fired. ;) The company was very East Coast, very sales-driven, not very tech-driven at the time. I don't like using age as a proxy for tech-savviness since there are plenty of tech-savvy older folks, but this was a bit of an older organization as well. But yeah, people adapt. They will kick and scream and claim that their world is ending and then a month later they'll forget about the old way of doing things. (Or, as was often the case, IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers.) And then the anger subsided.
  - 3825 14y ago
    >IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers I've noticed that using IMAP on multiple devices can cause Gmail to say that you're using too much resources. Tripped me when I first saw the limitations. I had not thought there were limits on Gmail. How did they handle issues where people might want to access Gmail from various devices? Google has some numbers and recommendations here[1] but I'm interested in how you handled situations like this in the real world. [1] https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1071518 https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...
recoiledsnake 14y ago
>want to find a Microsoft fan? look in accounting I seriously doubt Accounting has Microsoft fans as such. They're very wedded to their tools and workflow in order to do their job because they spend their entire day on email and spreadsheets. Take away those and replace them with crippled alternatives like only Excel on the web, and they'll still hate it even if made by Microsoft. How would a developer react if one day their vim editor was removed and replaced by EMACS or vice versa because of a mandate from the CEO?
- quanticle 14y ago
  No, it's worse than that. At least Emacs is roughly on par, in terms of capability. Replacing Excel with Google Docs Spreadsheets is like replacing vim with Notepad.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    Maybe in accounting (who should have better tools, anyway) Excel is irreplaceable, but most other Excel users make all kinds of idiotic tables with it, all of them without even a single mathematical operation. And that's to say nothing on the idiocy when those users decide they are empowered by their tools and decide they'll do math with them. I've seen more than one case where the AVG function was replaced with SUM and COUNT.
andrewljohnson 14y ago
I once recommended a 12 person company move from a self-hosted, internal exchange server to Google for email. They ignored me until a truck hit a telephone pole and we lost email for 2 days.
- ghaff 14y ago
  I worked for a similarly sized firm a few years ago and we also moved from Exchange to Gmail, partly because we had had a few severe outages with Exchange for various reasons. From a technical perspective, the migration went pretty smoothly. But there were at least a couple non-technical people on the business side who always hated the new system, partly because Gmail didn't have the hierarchical folder system they were used to. (And I don't think Gmail had sublabels at the time.)
  - jrpt 14y ago
    I feel you, nested labels is the easy answer to this. However, the better answer is teaching people about archiving and search. People used to folder their emails because searching was terrible. Gmail's search is pretty good, so the best workflow in my opinion is to archive email once you're done with it, and search if you need something specific. I do use labels too, especially auto-labels, but I've found search to be more useful. Still, some people are reluctant to change, and just want to do things the way they've always done it. So that's why nested labels exist.
    - graeme 14y ago
      My issue with gmail search is that it's incomplete, and I don't know how incomplete. I've downloaded my mail to mac's mail app. With identical search strings, the Mail app finds more messages. This includes searching by sender email, which yields incomplete results in gmail. There have been many occasions where I've only sent someone one email, or vice versa. Gmail often misses these. So for anything I must find (e.g. tax documents) I label them.
      - wlesieutre 14y ago

rubyrescue 14y ago

wow please tell more. "for a while" means people's anger passed? or you guys switched back?

nostromo 14y ago
I wasn't at the company for much longer after that. No, I wasn't fired. ;) The company was very East Coast, very sales-driven, not very tech-driven at the time. I don't like using age as a proxy for tech-savviness since there are plenty of tech-savvy older folks, but this was a bit of an older organization as well. But yeah, people adapt. They will kick and scream and claim that their world is ending and then a month later they'll forget about the old way of doing things. (Or, as was often the case, IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers.) And then the anger subsided.
- 3825 14y ago
  >IT just set up their Outlook to pull their emails from Gmail's servers I've noticed that using IMAP on multiple devices can cause Gmail to say that you're using too much resources. Tripped me when I first saw the limitations. I had not thought there were limits on Gmail. How did they handle issues where people might want to access Gmail from various devices? Google has some numbers and recommendations here[1] but I'm interested in how you handled situations like this in the real world. [1] https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1071518 https://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=...

recoiledsnake 14y ago

>want to find a Microsoft fan? look in accounting I seriously doubt Accounting has Microsoft fans as such. They're very wedded to their tools and workflow in order to do their job because they spend their entire day on email and spreadsheets. Take away those and replace them with crippled alternatives like only Excel on the web, and they'll still hate it even if made by Microsoft. How would a developer react if one day their vim editor was removed and replaced by EMACS or vice versa because of a mandate from the CEO?

quanticle 14y ago
No, it's worse than that. At least Emacs is roughly on par, in terms of capability. Replacing Excel with Google Docs Spreadsheets is like replacing vim with Notepad.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Maybe in accounting (who should have better tools, anyway) Excel is irreplaceable, but most other Excel users make all kinds of idiotic tables with it, all of them without even a single mathematical operation. And that's to say nothing on the idiocy when those users decide they are empowered by their tools and decide they'll do math with them. I've seen more than one case where the AVG function was replaced with SUM and COUNT.

andrewljohnson 14y ago

I once recommended a 12 person company move from a self-hosted, internal exchange server to Google for email. They ignored me until a truck hit a telephone pole and we lost email for 2 days.

ghaff 14y ago
I worked for a similarly sized firm a few years ago and we also moved from Exchange to Gmail, partly because we had had a few severe outages with Exchange for various reasons. From a technical perspective, the migration went pretty smoothly. But there were at least a couple non-technical people on the business side who always hated the new system, partly because Gmail didn't have the hierarchical folder system they were used to. (And I don't think Gmail had sublabels at the time.)
- jrpt 14y ago
  I feel you, nested labels is the easy answer to this. However, the better answer is teaching people about archiving and search. People used to folder their emails because searching was terrible. Gmail's search is pretty good, so the best workflow in my opinion is to archive email once you're done with it, and search if you need something specific. I do use labels too, especially auto-labels, but I've found search to be more useful. Still, some people are reluctant to change, and just want to do things the way they've always done it. So that's why nested labels exist.
  - graeme 14y ago
    My issue with gmail search is that it's incomplete, and I don't know how incomplete. I've downloaded my mail to mac's mail app. With identical search strings, the Mail app finds more messages. This includes searching by sender email, which yields incomplete results in gmail. There have been many occasions where I've only sent someone one email, or vice versa. Gmail often misses these. So for anything I must find (e.g. tax documents) I label them.
    - wlesieutre 14y ago