
Google makes an aggressive move to steal Microsoft Office customers - luu
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-apps-gives-microsoft-enterprise-agreement-customers-a-way-out-2015-10
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jbob2000
Pfft, good luck. My 65 year old mother nearly died from stress overload when
Office 2007 was released. Good fucking luck getting her to transfer to Google.
It's not free to transfer to Google when you need to retrain your entire
workforce on it.

Microsoft has it good with Office; they have an entire generation of Luddites
dependent on them.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The biggest problem with SaaS for seniors is that they expect the buttons to
not move. Anything with continuous deployment like Google anything, basically
sucks for seniors.

I get a call from an old lady every time the AOL website moves a button, for
serious.

~~~
irremediable
I feel like this is as often the fault of the designers as the user, though.
Of course it's going to confuse people if you change the design; and often,
such changes are arbitrary and unnecessary.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The key point is that if you own software on your PC, it doesn't change at
all. It only changes when the user allows an update to occur.

Web software changes spontaneously and breaks your workflow on a regular
basis. Seniors' understanding of how computers work is rarely flexible enough
to adapt to this.

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BostonEnginerd
Watch out with Google Apps - I transferred my domain's email over to Google
Apps. Now that I've moved my email out, apparently I need to continue paying
for the service otherwise I lose my Google Play library.

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rebootthesystem
Wow, that's a tough one on many fronts. As someone mentioned, the change in UI
when Office 2007 came out was more painful than most care to admit. I
personally went from feeling like a power user to a complete moron crying like
a little baby. Horrible move on Microsoft's part. Not sure we've gained
anything at all. But, now years later, it is what it is.

Then there's "Office as a Tool", which, to me, means mostly Excel.

Another big huge part of the MS ecosystem, at least for us, is the fact that
you can automate and create custom solutions using VBA (or Python). I don't
have any data to indicate this is commonplace but I'd like to think large
companies have such things as highly customize Excel spreadsheets doing all
kinds of interesting stuff.

As an example, we developed an Excel application to design Helmholtz
resonators for acoustic treatment of mixing rooms and high-end movie
projection rooms. It would calculate various room resonant modes, use a
database of materials to determine damping across the desired frequency ranges
and spit out Helmholtz resonator build parameters for low to mid-range
acoustical treatment. It worked like a charm and could be installed and loaded
by anyone with Excel.

Yet another tool was used to simulate FIFO timing for a frame buffer to be
implemented within a Xilinx FPGA for an image processing application. It would
allow faster verification of various parameters than running a Verilog
simulation and spit out a bunch of Verilog code based on results.

Another tool was a really neat state machine generator for embedded systems
using multi-line text LCD displays for a menu. You could build the menu in
Excel, click a few buttons and out would come a full state machine with
callback function definitions for full navigation through a menu as well as
dealing with screens where user adjustments could happen (think "volume up",
"volume down", "set temperature", etc.). If you've ever written and maintained
LCD menu code for an embedded system you can appreciate the advantage of
entering your menu into Excel and having cut-and-paste C code you can paste
into your Keil compiler (or whatever).

Another tool was created to help design Power Distribution Systems (PDS) for
high speed boards. In designing electronic boards operating at high
frequencies PDS integrity is a big deal. We wrote an Excel tool that encoded
all of the required knowledge (for our work) and allowed the engineer to
explore various PDS integrity topologies and configurations with graphs, etc.

A tool I really like helped with the time consuming task of creating land and
schematic patterns for Altium Designer. Rolling-up to your desk to create
schematic symbols and a pcb pattern for an FPGA with 1152 pins is, well, a
nightmare. And it is worst as a design is modified during development stages.
Our tool was able to take a process that consumed 10 to 12 hours and shrink it
down to 30 to 45 minutes.

We created a Powerpoint presentation that made heavy use of VBA to simulate a
full control panel, complete with a dot matrix LCD display. This tool was used
to both demonstrate functionality and train people on the system without much
more than a laptop running powerpoint.

I have a lot more examples like that. The point being that, in the right
hands, these Office tools are far more useful and capable than out of the box.

And then there's the financial side. Google tools cost money. We upgraded our
Office 2003 licenses to Office 2007 and we've been using that version ever
since. There's nothing in the new versions that is compelling enough to
upgrade. This means that the cost of Office becomes insignificant and non-
recurring, which can be very important.

Note to Microsoft: Want to get me (and others) to upgrade again? Make Python a
NATIVE alternative to VBA.

~~~
iofj
> Another big huge part of the MS ecosystem, at least for us, is the fact that
> you can automate and create custom solutions using VBA (or Python). I don't
> have any data to indicate this is commonplace but I'd like to think large
> companies have such things as highly customize Excel spreadsheets doing all
> kinds of interesting stuff.

[https://www.google.com/script/start](https://www.google.com/script/start)

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sudo-i
Is Google scanning/reading emails as to do advertising with Enterprise
customers? If so, I'd imagine a lot of companies have qualms with that
practice.

