
Microsoft Office is killing Google Apps and anemic iWorks - pgralla
http://blogs.computerworld.com/desktop-apps/23055/game-over-microsoft-office-killing-google-apps-and-anemic-iworks
======
cs702
Linkbait. This is a highly opinionated piece with an exaggerated title, short
on data and long on unjustified hyperbole. Microsoft Office isn't "killing"
anything. Both Office 365 and Google Apps are great products, and both are
winning large enterprise contracts when pitted against the other -- for
example, Google Apps just won a deal for 68,000 employees at Whirlpool,
beating Microsoft Office.[1]

\--

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/google-lands-whirlpool-for-
go...](http://www.businessinsider.com/google-lands-whirlpool-for-google-
apps-2013-10)

~~~
ChikkaChiChi
Thank you for this. I got the weirdest feeling from some of the responses
below that HN is being astroturfed.

I'm not a Microsoft hater, but it's being laid on a little thick.

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outside1234
Office 365 is the fastest growing Microsoft product ever. Microsoft has earned
ridicule in terms of Windows 8 and Windows Phone but to me they are doing all
the right things in this space.

They should have launched Android and iOS support a year ago but I suspect
that hole is going to be shut soon. I suspect Apple knows that too, and hence
is offering their less valuable product for free.

Just think how amazing Skype is going to be when its the primary way you
communicate in real time with the rest of the folks in your enterprise (I know
most of you aren't enterprise folks but if you are you get just how valuable
this is when 99% of the people you need to work with are in another building
or another part of the world). I have no doubt that is coming.

~~~
KevinEldon
Lync is the primary way to communicate in the large corporation I work for
today. It replaced my desk phone. I would never want to go back to a
traditional physical phone.

~~~
MichaelGG
I'll pile on here. Lync's fantastic. Seamless integration, multi-device. Has
phone support that's just plug-n-play (over USB). Proper presence info that
just works. The tie-ins with Outlook/OWA/Exchange for voicemail and such is
also really slick.

Slick and easy call management (forward, sent to group, VM), easy IM, group
IM, easy escalation to screen sharing or voice and video conferencing. All of
this is secured by your own TLS certs. IM history goes into Outlook, one
simple place for all forms of communication from SMS to missed calls,
voicemails, IMs and emails.

Edit: Oh, also, easy federated IM. We can now have customers federate via O365
and IM us directly. There are blocking tools in place to prevent abuse. But
it's far better than having to list a Skype/GTalk/AIM/MSN ID.

I'd love to know of a non-enterprise competitor in this space (like why go to
Cisco over MS?). Pretty much everything I've seen is not remotely on the same
level. For example, they'll plaster a "Dial" toolbar by rendering on top of
some other part of the Outlook UI, and then call that integrated dialing. Or
you'll have to use a web UI somewhere and login to a phone just to change your
call forwarding settings.

No particular pieces are terribly hard by themselves, but it's a massive
amount of work to get it all really polished up and have it just work so
wonderfully. Without the centerpoint of Exchange/Outlook, I think a Lync
competitor has a pretty big uphill battle.

------
diydsp
> Microsoft's biggest competitor for office suites is Google Apps,

Disagree. I'm a spreadsheet-fan and Numbers (mac version of Excel) is waaay
better than Google Doc's spreadsheet. In fact, Numbers rivals Excel in many
ways. For those who haven't used it, Numbers is more of a container that holds
all kinds of objects, like media files, text fields, and including
spreadsheets. This model, I've found, is way more effective at communicating
concepts that require textual descriptions alongside small blocks of
spreadsheets.

~~~
glennericksen
> Numbers rivals Excel in many ways

The only use case Numbers performs well is as spreadsheet presentation
software with the ability to edit. If you need to work with a lot of data or
crunch a lot of numbers, it's not even close. Excel wins.

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wikiburner
It seems to me that this is a situation similar to the one Dropbox found
itself in when starting out - the key obstacle for getting a file hosting
service to take off was universal device compatibility, and they spent a ton
of time on it and nailed it.

For any startup or other competitors to Office, the one key feature they must
get right is document compatibility. I know Microsoft doesn't play fair in
that regard, but I'm sure a motivated enough team could crack it.

Office is actually decent for being MS software, but a simplified and
streamlined web experience, reduced feature bloat, with online collaborative
tools, and made available free or cheap could steal a lot of market share.

~~~
akbar501
> a simplified and streamlined web experience, reduced feature bloat, with
> online collaborative tools, and made available free or cheap could steal a
> lot of market share.

Microsoft has this solution:
[https://skydrive.live.com](https://skydrive.live.com)

SkyDrive and the associated Office "lite" apps are free and feature light
versions of the Office suite products. For business there is the Office365
apps which are the logical progression.

Also, the desktop versions of the Office apps integrate with these cloud based
services.

For larger companies, there are also options to run in a private cloud and/or
behind the firewall.

------
jstalin
As a lawyer, the only option is Office. I've tried Docs and it's terrible.
Libreoffice had problems with ordered lists.

Office is far and away better than anything else out there in ease of use and
professional look.

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jaggederest
This thread is thick with dubious possible-astroturfing. Please, people, when
you're writing about commercialized products, try not to sound like their PR
team - you lose credibility even if you are genuine users.

~~~
MichaelGG
How do you suggest writing about a product that has turned out really
fantastic for your org? A product that appears to be far ahead of the
competition? I give my sincere opinion on Lync (although I didn't mention that
it's a real pain to configure for on-premise deploy) - after 9 years in
telecom, here's something that works like it should.

~~~
jaggederest
Phrases like "the competition" set off my buzzword detector.

I'm not ever thinking about 'the competition' of the products I'm using, I'm
thinking of other ways to solve the same problem.

I dunno, just try to stick to more descriptive terms - "It's worked really
well for us compared to the other telephony systems we've used", vs "it's far
ahead of the competition"? I'm not a writer by trade.

~~~
thinkloop
Lol, I personally would have preferred he wrote it in Shakespearian "tith
functioning supercedith thus of thyne competitors"

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calvin_c
Out of curiosity, where does HN stand on Office suites? I use iWork for most
of my work, but if I need to work on something quickly on any computer I use
Google. What do the rest of you use? Does anyone prefer Office?

~~~
larrik
LibreOffice. I can download it and install it faster than Microsoft Office,
even if the Office disc is in the drive. (I use Office stuff rarely enough
where that actually matters.)

Plus, LibreOffice is kind of the only option on Linux.

I don't use my Mac for anything serious outside of XCode.

~~~
jff
LibreOffice is goddamn awful. They should just scrap the whole thing and start
over, because I have never _not_ been screwed by LibreOffice.

Make a presentation within L.O., save it to the native L.O. format, then when
I open it again later, things have moved and fonts are different.

Any form the company sends me will be displayed incorrectly. Maybe fields
won't be fillable, or only some of the checkboxes will check. Maybe the 2 page
form will magically spread to 3 pages. Maybe it won't print at all.

------
zaidf
Also, google docs has been renamed to google drive, even if no one wants to
call it google drive.

~~~
thinkloop
And the way to download these serious work apps is through Google Play

------
codva
I just wrote my first proposal in Docs today, as an experiment to see if we
can stop emailing Word documents back and forth. Google Docs is missing some
very basic features, like page numbers in the table of contents, and the
ability to hide the footer and header on the first page.

That said, creating a cover page and table of contents as separate documents
and combining the pdfs later still seems like it'll better overall than
dealing with Word.

------
Philadelphia
It's "iWork", not "iWorks". It doesn't care what bloggers say about it, as
long as they spell its name right ;-)

------
ChikkaChiChi
Google Spreadsheets are adequate for basic spreadsheet use and Docs is good
enough for most document processing. Any time you start to lean in toward the
complex functionality or dealing with large data sets you are going to wish
you had a binary installed on your local machine.

------
xenophonf
I love me some Word/Excel/PowerPoint (even the much maligned Ribbon), and
Google Docs doesn't have anything close to Office's feature set. That said,
the ability to edit a document simultaneously in Google Docs is its killer
feature. The UX for this feature in Word/Excel (haven't tried PowerPoint yet)
is nowhere near as good, in my humble opinion. I find myself doing
collaborative composition in Docs and then, when necessary, moving to
Word/Excel to finish editing. (Also, it would be nice if I could edit
spreadsheets and presentations online in SharePoint.)

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37prime
My colleagues and I did numerous presentations in National (U.S.) conferences
in 2012 and 2013. I’m sure that my team was the only one using Keynote instead
of PowerPoint.

Taht being said, we get a lot of questions from the attendees and other
presenters about our presentation. Other presenters wanted to know how to make
theirs like ours in PowerPoint.

------
eliben
If you believe it, maybe it will happen!

[isn't that called "delusional"?]

