
Microsoft Office 365 beats out Google’s G Suite in S&P 1500 - ah-
https://tech.winton.com/blog/2016/12/technology-leadership
======
sz4kerto
Of course it does. We (@ work) use G Suite and it's good if you use it for
simple things, but it's really a toy. People who work a _lot_ with long-ish
documents all know that Word is better (because of richer functionality); and
people who work with larger spreadsheets know that Excel is better
(functionality and performance).

It's the typical situation: no user uses more than 5% of Excel's functionality
-- but users don't use the same 5%.

Where G Suite is great is 3rd party integrations, especially ones targeting
small/mid size companies.

~~~
hackcrafter
The model of natively cloud-hosted documents was Google's lead to loose, and I
think they are losing it.

O365 took the idea and ran. Yes, their web-based UI isn't as rich, but it has
some decent collaboration, really good mobile apps and of course excellent
desktop native apps.

Google could have held their lead IMHO if they kept building out their
Docs/Sheets to be closer to feature-parity with Word/Excel _and_ started
earlier on good mobile and desktop native apps (which don't even exist!)

I love me some google docs for collaborative editing, but your right in the
scaling of large docs in Word and Excel functionality.

~~~
TAForObvReasons
Google docs has to become office in terms of feature parity faster than office
online has to match google docs because the microsoft price point is
comparable to the standalone. Microsoft can always push people to use the
native word and excel apps for certain features because it's covered in the
cost of the 365 sub, but google can't do the same because it's a separate
cost.

~~~
hackcrafter
Yea, I agree.

I'm also amazed at how much suckage people are willing to put up with in O365,
but still consider it a better choice than Google Docs for the company.

Sharepoint is complete crap, and the off Sharepoint file syncer client is
absurdly flaky, but there is a huge tolerance for that kind of thing.

Or at least, it's not the biggest factor when considering making year+
commitments to one office suite or another.

Price, familiarity and feature-richness are definitely in MS favor.

~~~
dleslie
Isn't OneDrive replacing SharePoint?

~~~
tomc1985
They seem to be parallel services, like Lync and Skype. I still cannot figure
out where our documents are stored... is it on the windows share? OneDrive?
SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??

Outlook for Android is the biggest piece of shit to hit mobile and O365 on the
web takes a huge smelly dump on linux users. I am still angry at my employer
for foisting this garbage upon us, just so the nontechnical exec team can have
their precious Outlook

~~~
ZenoArrow
> "like Lync and Skype"

Lync has been renamed to Skype For Business, and is very similar in terms of
user experience to the standard Skype app.

> "I still cannot figure out where our documents are stored... is it on the
> windows share? OneDrive? SharePoint? My personal Dropbox??"

You can hardly blame Microsoft for the slack IT policies at your workplace.

~~~
tomc1985
Uh, the Mac client still says Lync, and it looks way different than Skype.

"Don't blame Microsoft for slack IT policies" What? Like hell I'm not blaming
them. It's not my fault they offer a bunch of shitty, complicated, barely-
working, overlapping, should-be-simple services that nontechnicals can barely
wrap their mind around. It's not my fault my employer hired me to work on
Linux code and then has a sudden Windows come-to-Jesus moment. (I'm sure
theres some stupid sales rep to thank for that...) It's not my fault that
Microsoft can't write decent AJAX!

If they would simply follow standards we wouldn't have this problem. But then
of course Micro$oft wouldn't make as much ca$h, and we certainly cant have
that now can we....

~~~
larrywright
Then you haven't upgraded: [https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-
business/downloa...](https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-
business/download-app?tab=tabs-3#Mac)

~~~
KirinDave
Not unusual. Many orgs are still lagging on Win10 as well. They have contracts
with things like _cough_ anti-virus providers of ill repute _cough_ and they
cannot upgrade because these tools don't work.

~~~
tomc1985
We're rather fond of Windows 7, because it pretty much just works. (And nobody
wants to deal with upgrading) A few of the handful of Win10 laptops have been
headaches.

"Lagging" is an interesting choice of words...

~~~
KirinDave
Funny you say that. Know what I'm doing right now?

Re-encoding MP4s to a slight variant of MP4 so that my demos are visible to
Win7 installs. Because they flip out. Known issue, I'm told, but not fixable.
Win7 is frozen!

You may not like Win10, but I think Win7 is a ghastly experience that is about
as fun as bamboo shoots under one's nails (for developers). It has 0
affordances for modern software development EXCEPT misapplications of the
Windows UI. Oh, also before I forget: old Win7 font rendering is substantially
uglier than new Win10 font rendering! Critical stuff!

If "just works for email" is your criterion, it's a mistake not to use
Chromebooks in the first place.

~~~
tomc1985
Well, it's not like you can expect Win7 to just doesn't magically support new
file formats? Video is complicated and finicky, you'd be doing bullshit tasks
like that for one reason or another

------
djrogers
Setting aside the accuracy of the data collection here, is it any surprise
that companies prefer an enterprise focused product backed by support
contracts, SEs, and actual desktop/mobile apps instead of web interfaces?

Oh, and one cannot overlook the power of Excel lock-in here - the number of
business lines run on excel macros in this country is staggering...

~~~
gdulli
Yeah, personally I find desktop apps to be much more usable than shoehorning
complex functionality into a browser tab, which is always awkward.

My current company was on Google apps for about 2 years and then switched to
Office for the last 2 years. I can't say MS is better at everything, but
overall I definitely prefer it.

I will say the "cloud" evolution of Microsoft Office is annoying. Every time I
start a new document it wants to default to saving it to OneDrive and pops up
a login window. I just want to work on local files, dammit.

~~~
knz
> I can't say MS is better at everything, but overall I definitely prefer it.

My employer is trying to roll out O365 to the enterprise. Some of us have been
using Google without official IT blessing (due to needing to get shit done in
the absence of an official solution) for years.

The biggest pain point so far as been moving from Hangouts to Skype for chat.
The UI on Skype is awful - multiple pop up's instead of one page
([https://hangouts.google.com/](https://hangouts.google.com/)), a native
client that wants to update way too often vs a website, and for some reason
every new conversation with someone starts a new window even if the person
already has one open. It's a joke.

~~~
raesene9
you could always use Microsoft Teams for chat now...
([https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-
chat...](https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams/group-chat-
software))

~~~
knz
That actually looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.

~~~
jyrkesh
Teams even works as a fully-functional (i.e. chat, voice, video, groups)
replacement client for Skype for Business. In my opinion, it works much better
as a SFB client; hoping it eventually just takes over SFB.

------
nickpp
We're using G Suite at work and while Mail, Calendar and Docs are OK, the
other apps in their offering are atrocious. I'll give you some examples.

Sheets has problems well documented online for years. No recent activity on
them whatsoever.

Groups (which is used pretty much everywhere as the only roles&permissions
mechanism) are like mailing lists from last century. A separate interface
kind-of-but-not-quite gmail threads replies by subject only! God forbid you
try to use the "shared mailbox" surrogate.

Directory doesn't even have calendar-integrated birthdays, something which is
basic in a company.

There is no Wiki. Its "replacement", Google Sites comes in two flavors: the
old ones - feature complete but really dated and the new ones which don't even
support tables or mail notifications... Compare that to the superb Microsoft
OneNote...

So I seriously wonder: how many people are working on this offering? Is this
something Google gives a sh*t about? Do they intend to improve it in the
future?

Or should we cut our losses and switch now?

------
ChuckMcM
This isn't too surprising, as a paid G Suite user my 'help' experience was
better than that of the free version (at the time) but it was still sub-par to
the support Microsoft gave for even small businesses that bought 15 licenses
to Office.

The killer is that Google still has not cracked the 'support people who don't
like to use computers but have to' nut and it is very very hard for them to
get there. Until they can get there I don't see them making either serious
inroads or serious cash flow from any consumer facing app/device.

------
Apocryphon
Just this morning I found myself unable to switch between two Google Drive
accounts, because both of them had the same domain, @gmail.com.

Signing out of a single account leads to all accounts being signed out. Gmail
was launched 12 years ago.

Why, Google, why?

~~~
amerkhalid
Another issue that drives me nuts with Google Drive is that it crashes
Lightroom if I keep LR catalog in Drive folder. I either have to shutdown
Drive while working in Lightroom or move catalog out of Drive folder.

I don't think I ever had crashes when I kept catalog in Dropbox folder. Once
my subscription runs out, I will probably try out OneDrive or go back to
Dropbox.

~~~
therealmarv
That's a problem of their Google Drive Desktop Sync program. I also hated it
(it also sucks a lot of CPU). Since switching to Insync for desktop synching
all my problems with GDrive are gone. Google should buy this tiny company for
their great work with GDrive.

~~~
raarts
I agree. Huge fan of Insync.

~~~
amerkhalid
Thanks, I ll try it out.

------
Spooky23
Microsoft put the hard squeeze on EA customers and just turned their reseller
model upside down. Most people are forced into paying for some sort of O365
offering, so the path of least resistance is to just go for it.

The other thing is that Google is impossible to deal with. Their product is
awesome, but enterprises are a hobby for them. Their field sales and SE force
is small and have a limited scope. They come off inflexible, while it's easy
to get Microsoft or partners to do all sorts of stuff on a pre-sale basis.

Microsoft has the advantage of interia around the traditional office suite and
email. The other services are shit. Skype is an abomination. SharePoint is
little better.

~~~
s3r3nity
>The other services are shit.

Our company (~200+) just started using MSFT Teams, and I find it's pretty
underrated. It's not as polished as a Slack/Hipchat, but the MSFT team is
super responsive to our feedback, and you can tell they're excited about
iterating on it.

I wish Skype was a bit better, I agree - but I'm hoping their recent
restructure of the Skype team will help this moving forward.

~~~
Spooky23
Hasn't arrived for my tenant yet, I'm really looking forward to it.

I agree they are great at ops and some of the smaller new products. But the
legacy of things like Lync/Skype and SharePoint is a boat anchor.

------
rwc
One of my biggest frustrations running my business on G Suite is knowing if
the product is something Google seriously cares about.

With Office, there's a predictable schedule of product updates and I never
doubt Microsoft's seriousness about maintaining Office hegemony. Meanwhile
Google's communications about G Suite updates and roadmap leave much to be
desired.

One example of Google not prioritizing desktop software: _finally_ Google
Drive for Teams is in the pipeline, delivering a "hard drive in the cloud"
concept (helping our team understand everybody has their own drive has been
nightmarish). But in the beta testing, they don't support the desktop app at
all for sync. What's the point of that?

------
TAForObvReasons
TIL S&P 1500 refers to the combination of the the S&P 500, S&P Mid cap (400)
and S&P Small cap (600) companies: [http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-
composite-1500/](http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/)

------
partiallypro
Office 365 and G Suite are no comparable to be honest. My old company had 365
(Fortune 500 company,) my new one has G Suite (Start-up.) I miss Office 365. I
actually just use my personal copy of Office 365 on my own device (BYOD.) Also
from a Sysadmin view Office 365 is miles ahead of where older versions of
office were. The only problem I suppose is that G Suite is a bit cheaper and
it attracts small-mid sized businesses. I do find their offering to be pretty
sizable and they keep adding new products to Office 365 to existing members.

------
FussyZeus
I pay for O365 but barely use the web apps. Google's losing IMHO because web
apps suck, simple as that. Yes every once in awhile I'll fire one of them up
because I need to check something and then 30 seconds later I'll remember why
I never use them; slow, clunky, unstable.

Native apps forever (or until the infrastructure is built out more at least.)

~~~
nu5500
And if you have something like a Surface, the native apps have great inking
support. Just open up a Word doc, sign it and send it back. The web apps are
nice in a pinch, but I find that they have these (probably intentional)
shortcomings that make them fall short of doing real day-to-day work. For
example, no format painter in Excel Online. That doesn't make any sense to me
and these features should at least be available to paying customers.

~~~
FussyZeus
I'd imagine it's about half intentional, half limitations of the platform.
Doing some of the stuff that Excel does in a browser would be maddening.

------
tangue
Anecdata : I tried to switch the company to Gsuite by sharing more and more
docs using the personal version. It works well until for some reason they
changed the way to create a new document, instead of the classical file > new
it was a big "+" sign at the bottom of the screen. Nobody could figure it out
and even if they switched back to a more classical ui later (or that we were
in the wrong sample of an A/B) usage of drive and Google Apps declined.

------
advisedwang
Very curious to see what the delta is next time they run this analysis. The
trend is really more indicative of success than a single snapshot, I believe.

~~~
dispose13432
The trend seems to be going to MS also. Remember that Google pioneered the
idea.

~~~
type0
I don't think it's true, although the dates on wikipedia might be wrong and I
have no time or interest to look on the sources.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_S...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoho_Corporation#Zoho_Office_Suite)
[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs,_Sheets_and_Slides)

------
Ironlink
We're currently going through a migration from G Suite to Office 365, and so
far my impression of Office is mostly downright bad. All of the online apps
seem like slow knock-off products.

In particular, Excel Online feels like a joke compared to Google Spreadsheets.
At first you notice the sluggish movement of focus from cell to cell due to
this ridiculous animation. Then when you select a cell value from a drop-down
and hit tab, focus moves down instead of to the right, which is infuriating
when you suddenly find yourself typing in the wrong cell. Somehow they screwed
up copy and paste as well, sometimes pasting takes multiple seconds. Then if
you work on something else for a bit, the page gives you an error about
inactivity and makes you reload in order to resume. The whole thing is so bad
I do my work in Google Spreadsheets and then copy the finished work into Excel
Online.

As a developer, one of my primary use-cases for spreadsheets is to generate
and maintain an overview of different legacy implementations, the state of
their rewrite, and any changes in behavior we've made. This type of work is
largely done collaboratively with other devs and project leads. Turns out this
type of real time collaboration for spreadsheets is basically dead with Office
365. It feels like we're going backwards in time, I used to just share the
document and others would make their changes, but now we're fighting over file
locks and in a few cases I've heard of people sending files back and forth
with email.

Also, I really miss the "Shared with me" view in Google Drive. With OneDrive
there is a separate drive for myself and for each group I'm a member of. When
someone shares a file with one of my groups it doesn't show up in my OneDrive,
I have to look through each of the groups' OneDrive.

Oh, and the online scheduling assistant is useless when you invite a group of
people. The whole group shows up as one "person" who is busy as soon as anyone
is busy. Also, noone can see the RSVP status except for the organizer, so when
our scrum master is home sick I have no idea who has accepted the meeting. And
why do canceled meetings stay in my calendar but renamed to "Canceled: XYZ"?

/rant

~~~
raarts
I have similar experiences. For a customer I need to use O365, but if you
don't need it for some features it really feels backwards. Spreadsheets that
kill your session after very short idle times, using multiple accounts gets
confused, constantly choosing between Web and desktop version of the software,
shared editing very clunky, sharepoint just sucking in general, I can't get
used to it.

------
bla2
Office has been around for over 25 years. Most businesses use it, and 365 is
included. So isn't the surprise that G Suite (silly name) shows up anywhere on
the same scale at all, with it being a third as old?

------
nunez
You'd be surprised by the number of companies locked into Microsoft products.

~~~
pjmlp
Willingly, because most competition is actually worse.

------
chrisper
I am using O365 for my own domain (with only 1 user) and had only great
experiences so far. The support is great too!

------
pfarnsworth
That's the benefit of a real enterprise sales force who already sell them
their Windows, Office and SQL Server licenses. Office 365 is probably just an
upsell rather than an entirely new product.

And Microsoft has actual reliable support, unlike Google. It makes a
difference when selling into large companies.

------
ahmedfromtunis
Honestly, I can't get this. I use both Office 365 (@ work) and Google (@
everywhere else). And oh boy how sluggish, impractical and featureless Office
is. I HATE every second I spend using it. Hell, even Zoho Docs are much more
smoother and UX friendly than that piece of sub-MVP piece of software that
Office 365 is.

Edit: I wanted just to say that I tried Office 365 on three different
platforms: Ubuntu, Windows and macOS. On both Chrome and Firefox. Every time
it's sooo slow, even just to list the files in a directory.

Editing becomes hellish (with visible latency) if I type more than a couple of
pages (I'm journalist by day).

It's not that Google Drive is better than O365. EVERYTHING is better than
O365.

------
keeganjw
To be fair, by far the most powerful weapon the Spaniards had was disease, not
technology. That's what ended up killing millions of Native Americans. So,
it's a bit of a weird analogy...

~~~
Melkman
You mean like a virus ?

I found it a weird analogy because I couldn't figure out who are supposed to
be the Spaniards. Is it Google because they are up against a competitor that
is massively entrenched in the office suite market ? Or is it Microsoft
because they seem to be expanding their presence.

------
mrmondo
O365 is the most unreliable, haphazard, glued together, frequently unavailable
piece of $&,$/$! that my team and I have used for 4 years. I can honestly say
that I have never in my life experienced such repeatedly unreliable software
in my life. Worse yet it's backed by the most incapable off-shored and
overworked support team(s) that we now no longer bother to log queries with.

------
mark_l_watson
While I use some Google products (AppEngine, GCP, Play movies+music), I don't
think they compete with Office 365 where for $99/year family plan my wife and
I each get 1 TB cloud storage and all the Office apps that we use on Mac
laptops, Android phones, and our iPads. Such a good deal, and once when I
needed customer service it was there and someone helped within a few minutes.

------
ksec
May be some big company has access to Google. But Microsoft has much better
support for the rest of us, SME or Large Enterprise.

And Google simply dont "get" it. Not Business, Not Enterprise.

Newest Office is pretty nice, they finally refined Ribbon to a point where it
is half usable. And Hosted Exchange is simply much better then Gmail. Having
used IBM Notes, Gmail and Exchange, I am surprised Exchange works better with
iOS out of the box.

I was actually looking for some light weight alternative to Office, Exchange
Email, One Drive. But i have find none so far. There may be services that
individually works better then Office counterpart, but as a package it seems
M$ Ecosystem is hard to beat right now.

------
ksk
Hmm, our office went from using Google docs/office to Office 365 Online, to
finally using the desktop version. The web versions of frankly both products
seemed just too slow and unreliable.

------
tek-cyb-org
in other news, water is liquid.

------
bitmapbrother
It's important to differentiate the offerings. O365 without access to their
desktop apps is a sub par experience that is easily bested by G Suite. If you
do have access to the full blown Office apps then, of course, the O365
solution is better. Albeit, MS will make you pay dearly for it.

------
canterburry
Hmmm...I wonder why S&P 1500 was the benchmark? It's kind of an atypical
bracket for S&P companies to compare. Why not the more common 500, 1000 or
2000?

Is it because the statistics come out in M$ favor when only looking at the
1500 bracket rather than 500 or 2000? Hmm...

------
Anardo
No fucking shit! Google makes a product, and then goes to fucking sleep like a
little fucking bitch.

