My day job is at a massive institution. We recently went all-in on O365. The odds of us ever leaving this platform are slim-to-none. Microsoft has really hit a powerful long-term business model.
The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing. We're buying them anyway so no matter what Google offers us they can't beat the cost savings Microsoft can provide. Same with AWS vs Azure — we can use our volume licensing in the cloud with Azure where with other providers we'd have to pay through the nose.
Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. And I think that disruption will take quite a while.
Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo.
Windows is under enormous threat, and much of our computing now takes place on alternate devices. The example of O365 is the perfect example, that platform being equally usable across many platforms (because it had to to have any market influence).
And if Microsoft is just discounting everything to get your business, that doesn't support the theory of Microsoft dominance. It is yesteryear trying to desperately hang on to have relevance. That is not an example of why Microsoft is a 1T company, but is an example of why the future doesn't look so hot.
Is there real competition in the front-office / back-office "alternate devices" space? There are certainly niche players but at least at the $bigcos I've worked at, most "real" tasks aren't easily accomplished on a tablet, phone, or Chromebook. Web spreadsheets tend to be feature-incomplete, presentation and document creation is a mess, and that's not even starting in on the hundreds of proprietary front-office tools for appointment scheduling and client management and back-office tools for analytics and finance, which are strongly Windows-based. I've only seen a few people use tablets day-to-day and they're all mid-to-upper level execs whose jobs are far more delegation-and-communication oriented and who have the liberty of sending someone an email when they need "the numbers" pulled or a slide presentation whipped together.
Even the BigCos I've worked at who use GSuite have had an additional subscription to Office365 for employees who need Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. I've seen very few larger companies who can subsist on Google Sheets alone.
This could be something that changes in the next 5-10 years, certainly, but it's been a prophecy that's underdelivered for years. Kind of feels like the "year of Linux on the desktop" all over again.
I've worked with Office 365 & helped setup & admin several GSuite businesses. GSuite is a nice light alternative. It's online Office apps seem to trump Office 365's online Office apps but the desktop version that comes with most Office 365 subscriptions is in a league of its own. You have to purchase GSuite plugin after plugin to try & replace its capabilities.
I think if you're trying to replace user-facing Excel, Access, or Word usage of a meaningful sort with anything but other specialized tool is a fools errand.
At the same time: GSuite is leagues better, more intuitive, homogenous, more collaborative, friendlier to sysadmins, and friendlier to document-based data manipulation. It's also more than "good enough" for the 99% use cases of PowerPoint, Excel, Word, Paint, etc.
GSuite for all, Thick Old Office for the accountants and data crunchers who need it, all docs on Google Drive... why not?
O365 is kinda ok (things that should work dont, the split between online and offline is ass, the tools are heavy, the collaboration is semi-hidden), but it's the sharepoint and up-selling of Azure services that make it kinda Evil. I think a hybrid approach preserves the moral high ground and best-tool-for-the-job.
I think it's fair to assume that moving so many users to a new platform (new to the users) - will take some time and getting used to. Email being one of the biggest pain points.
If anything, such a large migration from software suite to another is most likely very rare. So probably begs the question why would a company do something like this if there isn't obvious benefit of doing this.
Since I haven't used Microsoft products in a long time, I can't tell gsuite is vastly superior, other than very specialized edge cases for excel and word. For most people, it probably is more than good enough and not worth the extra money or (presumably) worse user experience.
I worked at two GSuite companies that handed out Chromebooks to the outside Sales team.
Automated Google Sheet reports, easy to maintain organizational documentation.
One was acquired by a S&P 509 and forced to convert to O365. The CFO quietly carved out an exception in the budget citing "conversion costs" so Accounting and Sales don't have to convert.
Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over.
I think the automation and Enterprise document management story in GSuite is just better than the Sharepoint nightmare and heavyweight knowledge-graph approach of O365. I think going over to O365 would be a lot harder than the opposite, for an advanced user, thanks to how automation works on those platforms...
> Lots of shops struggle to avoid O365 because "everyone is used to Word", and once you have an Excel macro that's mission critical... game over.
Correct and in this case, that was exactly what happened except with the GSuite benefiting.
There was a number of Google Sheets that were automatically populated by database queries on an hourly basis. These were regularly viewed by the L1s (such as daily orders, distribution statistics, accounting summaries) and the Sales team (who wanted to know their commissions ASAP daily).
Then you had a bunch of managers who used those sheets to do light analysis with macro magic.
They discount it to sweeten the deal for your company's accounting department, who are almost always 100% suits who want what's familiar and have enough influence over the accounts to be able to get their way.
But the reality is that for a 100% single-vendor, integrated system that works well with everything that's already installed in an SMB or larger, there are no competitors for O365.
Back when I was doing SMB consulting gigs, I tried to steer a few folks away from it, because I think it's a bad long-term move to rely on too many services from a single vendor, and especially when those are all off-premises services that depend on a lot of working technology between you and the vendor. But, it became clear before long that I was giving bad advice. The clients that ignored me and went with O365 were happier, and when something went wrong, they just shrugged and said, "oh well, Microsoft will fix it soon."
Whereas if something went wrong with any other system, it was my fault because I recommended it, even if I couldn't do anything about whatever particular piece was broken.
Anyway, point is, every customer that signs up for O365 at any price is going to be a Microsoft customer for a very long time, and I don't see anybody on the horizon that is going to be changing anyone's mind about it.
> It is yesteryear trying to desperately hang on to have relevance.
What an incredibly misguided comment.
Microsoft is a major player in the business software market, and there's no sign that will change anytime soon.
Sure, Windows is not a growth center, but it's still a huge business and will continue to be for several years. Meanwhile Office 365 is adequately protecting their productivity business, and Azure is growing at an enormous rate.
Most importantly, Microsoft has a massive home advantage when selling to businesses. They are the masters of cross-selling, and unlike consumer companies like Google, they know how to compete in markets without winner-takes-all outcomes (enterprise buyers, unlike consumers, know how to play vendors against each other to limit lock-in).
As long as they deliver good enough products, it will be very hard to uproot them.
You strangely follow this by essentially supporting my comment.
This whole conversation is a bit surreal, in a way, because we've been having it for literally a decade while Microsoft stagnates and becomes less and less important in this industry, a bit like IBM. The absolutely domination that Microsoft held in the late-90s to early-00s is something that is seems many in here are blissfully unaware. I remember desperately getting those technet early release discs to try to get a headstart on whatever Microsoft was doing next. Now...who cares? Like literally, Microsoft initiatives that are anything more than "yup, still selling that thing we got some entrenchment in a decade ago...and if we go outside of the lines even a bit it will spell doom" just fizzles. Remember when Exchange/MAPI integration was Microsoft's beachhead? BOOM. Then it was Office, but Microsoft had to rebuild Office to work on virtually every device or they would have had a mass exodus. Windows CE/Windows Mobile...all the Microsoft pull in the world was worth exactly nothing.
Now, astonishingly few shops are actually making Windows apps. In-house development is overwhelmingly web apps, or even Android/iOS. People have mentioned contact management, scheduling, etc -- all overwhelmingly web and mobile apps, or at a minimum cross-platform.
In the financial world the entire next generation of platforms are cross-platform or web-based. No one is pinning anything on Microsoft.
I'm not anti-Microsoft by any measure -- I'm typing this on Windows 10 right now -- and the various fanboy "boooo, stop hating on M$" type replies are boorish. It's just a completely different world, and Microsoft is another IBM now.
>There is a wide spectrum between "absolute domination" (your strawman) and "desperately trying to stay relevant" (your argument).
I said that Microsoft is fighting to stay relevant, which is most certainly in contrast to their once position of domination. These statements are supporting, not in conflict. There is no fallacy.
>Only someone with very little actual experience of the business software market would make such a claim.
Microsoft has $90 billion in sales. They'll likely generate ~$25 billion in net income this year. Both their sales and profit figures for 2018 are likely to be record highs based on how their business is performing the last few quarters.
They're the worlds largest software company by both sales and profit.
They're also the world's most valuable software company and the third most valuable company period.
If this is what qualifies as fighting to stay relevant, there are only a few companies in world history that have ever been relevant.
I guess it depends on what you consider relevant. If being relevant is to continue to exist as a large company then yes Microsoft is relevant, as is IBM, Oracle or SAP. If being relevant means to shape the future of tech then I think the jury is still out.
Microsoft certainly has potential. Their AI research and offerings are right up there next to Google's. Combining AI with SQL and Office could enable some real productivity advances. Microsoft is also top notch at PC gaming, a significant consumer niche.
But I think Microsoft also has one rather big problem that is currently masked by their Azure growth rates. That problem is Windows. I think Windows may be in permanent decline.
I know this sounds far fetched given the seemingly unassailable dominance of Windows on corporate desktops. It's indispensible for a very wide array of tasks right now. No need to reiterate all of them.
But Windows has largely lost personal computing to Android and iOS (as well as some Mac and Chrome OS in the US). Where it's still being used for personal computing it's often as a mere host for a web browser with the added benefit of a physical keyboard.
Windows has effectively lost the generation that will shape corporate environments in the years and decades to come, and that has the potential to erode both Office and their server-side offerings. Windows is losing share everywhere, even on Azure.
It's one thing to talk an entreched Windows shop into using Azure. They certainly get some impressive growth numbers out of it. But it's quite a different challenge for Microsoft to sell to people who went from school through university using iOS or Android, collaborating via Google Docs and Google Drive for free. It's going to be a very hard sell for Microsoft.
There is an avalanche of these folks that's going to hit corporate environments in the coming years. They have no attachment to Microsoft and they have zero tolerance for Microsoft's obscure sales language and licensing terms.
It seems to me that Microsoft doesn't consider desktop Windows to be strategic any longer (in that quite frankly it fucking sucks in so many ways that could be fixed with not that much effort, and I say this as a "fanboy"), which I think is a massive miscalculation but I see no sign that they're going to change and it will continue to wither on the vine.
> Windows has effectively lost the generation that will shape corporate environments...
No they haven't. As evidence - there is an avalanche of young gamers and streamers using Windows. Almost every streamer and gamer using Twitch.tv are on Windows. Watch the programming streams - it's almost exclusively done on Windows.
Those "entrenched Windows shops" are everywhere as well. Throw a stone and you'll hit one. I bought a car the other day and everyone on the sales floor and in their finance office is running Windows. My wife is a teacher and guess what they use in their administrative offices and guess what every teacher uses to get email?
Every insurance shop I've seen runs Windows. Every call center I've ever seen runs Windows. Every sales office I've ever seen runs Windows, even in industries such as publishing where the Mac is popular.
> But Windows has largely lost personal computing to Android and iOS.
I wouldn't call this computing...it's more like consumption. People who need to work at home aren't using Android and iOS. My brother in law works for a big financial house. When he works at home, he isn't using Android or iOS. Same with my sister in law who works for a big insurance company.
> They have no attachment to Microsoft [people who went from school through university using iOS or Android]...
New employees don't start off by being able to change whatever they want. Furthermore, they will learn more on the job than they did in school. If they simply cannot find alternatives to things that need to be done on Windows, they'll use Windows and other Microsoft tools. And finally, I doubt anyone makes it through university using only iOS and Android.
>No they haven't. As evidence - there is an avalanche of young gamers and streamers using Windows.
That's a niche. Most games are played on mobile these days. Just look at the sales numbers of gaming PCs. I did mention gaming by the way, so yes that is an area of hope for Microsoft, but it's small.
>Those "entrenched Windows shops" are everywhere as well.
Absolutely, and I said as much. But being entrenched doesn't necessarily make you relevant.
It's not a safe bet that anyone would choose to build anything new on Microsoft tech just because the insurance sales guy still has his Windows laptop or because everyone logs into the corporate network via AD.
Microsoft knows that. It's why they scramble to diversify away from Windows. They want us to use Azure. They want us to use their AI. They want us to use Office. They don't want to get dragged down by Windows, and I think Satya Nadella is doing a great job executing this strategy. But I also think the most difficult phase in this transition away from Windows is still ahead of us and it's not going to be easy.
>I wouldn't call this computing...it's more like consumption.
You do have a point there, but the things we do with computers and networks have changed. Even consumption requires a lot of computing, just not on the end user's device.
When I do research as part of my work I use Google and sometimes Duckduckgo. There's a lot of computing going on, but it's mostly done on some Linux server.
Even most line of business apps are now web based (with important exceptions). As a share of all computing that is done to keep a business running, I bet that even the most entrenched Windows shops now use less Windows specific tech than they used to.
> There's a lot of computing going on, but it's mostly done on some Linux server.
Microsoft IIS has maintained close to 30% of public Web servers and that’s not even counting intranet servers where IIS likely has a majority market share.
I think the term stay is being misinterpreted rather bizarrely.
Microsoft is relevant. They are fighting to stay relevant because the future is, in every way, moving against them. Yes, they are fantastically profitable on the inertia they achieved in prior decades, exactly like IBM was. If Microsoft doesn't gain a lot of relevance they going to eventually hit exactly the same sort of curve.
I mean...their revenue has stagnated for half a decade now.
What you seem to be missing is, someone with zero knowledge whatsoever of this market who read your comment would have an understanding dramatically different than reality. Your words are misleading.
Microsoft is very, very far from "desperately trying to stay relevant" in the realm of business software but I also wanted to point something else out which pretty much wrecks your argument.
Have you ever been to Twitch.tv? It's perhaps the biggest thing in gaming right now and guess what desktop OS everybody runs there if they're not running a console?
Oh and if they are running a console, guess what half of those consoles are?
That doesn't really "wreck" my argument. Twitch.tv might seem big in your world, but in the overall computing space it is absolutely tiny. Minuscule.
But yes, lots of people game on Windows. Lots of people have Windows installed. You seem to think that is a counterpoint, and I daresay it comes from a terribly naive perspective.
I would say Google is the new Microsoft of the 2000s now. From what I hear from friends, it’s very slow moving and filled with empire building leaders like Microsoft had. Amazon is really commendable in this aspect. Culture really does make a big difference no matter how smart your engineers are. I mean just look at how many chat/messenger products they have now.
Gsuite may be lightweight now but it’s only a few years away from feature creep with PMs pushing their shit and making it a bloated mess.
In fairness: if management is choosing a Widget vendor, which offers volume licensing, then we're talking about a standard business model in many industries.
If management is choosing a Document vendor, one of which is offering cheaper OS licensing in order to lock the purchaser into a treadmill of neverending consultant fees and half-baked integration work where the vendor will constantly push unrelated services and licensing to fix their own products because of walled gardens obscured by lacking technical and business competence on the part of the purchaser, we're talking MS. It's a highly successful strategy, but it undermines their customers and has left a sour taste in many a mouth.
I don't know if Embrace, Extend, Extinguish counts as a "sinister plot"... I can't say I'm the most competent here to speak to what lies in the heart of "marketing" or "sales" people, much less at a giant like MS... I can say that the sellers I know would gleefully participate in sinister plots if it meant a better office and parking space.
My issue isn't the discounting, it's the discounting on things that require large addition investments to get working 'properly' in a modern context, and large ongoing investments into that same suppliers ecosystem.
Office "needs" Sharepoint. Lots of Sharepoint and automation "needs" BizTalk. Neither of these are practically made to be customer managed, both require armies of external (MS partnered...), consultants.
This implicit subscription to supplier monotheism undermines correct business decisions and creates economic impedence against correct business action. Sharecropping has never been a good fit for businesses who need to lead.
I know an organization that switched to Office365 some time ago— from Google Entreprise / G suite:
Some people do use Google tools on the side, using personal accounts for collaborating on documents (presentations, docs). They don’t necessarily know the organization was using them before, it’s like they’re bringing them inside as a new tool.
Many exchange many MS Office words via e-mail (using desktop email clients).
People use WeTransfer for sharing files internally or with contractors.
People used to use Google Drive for sharing static files and it seems that this shared drive usage stopped and that people are not using OneDrive, relying on email and wetransfer.
(I would not be surprised if some team Slack exist somewhere or I’m pretty sure many use their Facebook messengers to send quick links and references)
As far as I know, the only consistently used Office365 tools are Mail and Calendar.
Office365 doesn’t seem to induce the same collaborative patterns that Google Drive induce at all.
Mostly it feels communication and collaboration are like 10 years or more ago:
email is king, versioning is absent, and people use external tools when they feel it’s quicker and better (at odd with the organization policies of course)
PS: I’ll add that all of my students are used to Google Drive tools, using Docs and Presentations regularly. It grew progressively over the year, and now it’s very rare to encounter a student who never used Google Drive.
I teach to 150+ students each year, so I’d say it’s representative of a new wave of professionals who take real-time collaborative tools for granted (and will be sorely disappointed by tools and process in the organizations they’re about to join)
Microsoft seems to be working very hard to get people to collaborate using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint sites for the projects you are involved in the office.
We are trying so hard to use Teams, but the performance is just not up to snuff. They took a shortcut using Electron to get it cross-platform. For such a large pervasive company, I don't think this shortcut is worth it as they should have just invested in native like their other desktop apps. It's going to hurt them long term in my opinion. I even submitted a user voice about the memory issue and slow UI.
Pretty sure they are working on a Universal App for Windows. Which means many of your concerns could be addressed. I haven't noticed any issues with the OSX version, but I don't use my Mac much.
Not related to your post, but I just need to tell someone. Literally nobody in my company has managed to understand the threaded messaging in Teams, even after it's pointed out/explained to them.
That's par for the course though. I used linux almost exclusively at Uni. I've never worked at a large org that deploys linux (even at the comparative cost)
because Windows provides them with the domain tools they need.
> I know an organization that switched to Office365 some time ago— from Google Entreprise / G suite
Smart move. Microsoft has a proven track record of long term commitment to products. Google has a proven track record of not being committed to products.
Google Reader first release 2005, discontinued 2013.
Google Code Search was another notable casualty and many others.
Now, one can point to Microsoft's web authoring efforts having cancelled a number of products(Frontpage etc) as well as cancelling Silverlight, VB6 etc etc.
Still MS Office Suite seems significantly more important to Microsoft than Google Docs is to Google.
At the massive institution I work at, we recently went all-in on O365 18 months ago and are now switching to Google (over the next 12 months). So perhaps, but the room for change seems to be evident.
Word works best on Windows. Google Doc works best on Chrome. It's totally expected that if you go with the vendor's full stack, things will run better.
I've worked—at Google—extensively on documents using Google Docs on a Chromebook and the experience is pretty smooth.
O365 works great on Firefox in any OS. GDoc sucks on any browser that isn't Chrome. The most frustrating thing is that GDoc's is the only app I'm aware of that doesn't support right click / copy-paste from the context menu in any browser other than Chrome.
Microsoft’s Office Online (their version of Google Docs) has the same behavior on Firefox with right click clipboard functions as GDocs, unfortunately.
we did a similar thing. nobody can figure out why.
gsuite is cool for a couple hundred people, when you dont want to pay for office licenses for everyone. it makes even less sense when you already do.
there is a serious productivity delta between gsuite and o365, especially if you are like 90% of the other companies where Excel is king (no, sheets is not a suitable stand-in).
It's used very technically and often by people who don't view themselves as technically capable so the lock-in is enormous.
Not to mention that you can't do 1/4 of what Excel can do in sheets without writing a googleScript. Don't even try to open a 100 column 1,000,000 row spreadsheet (which are more common than most think) in Sheets.
If that operation happens more than a couple of times a year, the organization should have figured out an Excel replacement a long time ago. One possibility is that a human is doing something to each of some significant portion of those rows, in which case more data entry should take place earlier and closer to the business. If that isn't the case, then just write a damn report already!
Actually there is one more possibility, that one or more goofballs in accounting just like to waste time "looking over the numbers and getting a feel for them". This generates lots of spurious questionably-motivated inquiries to business and IT people (who always blame the other party, when only accounting is to blame for their own vague feelings). In that case don't worry about fixing anything at the company, just get a different job somewhere else.
Clearly you are not a power excel user. Excel is brilliant for such tables. The charting,manipulation, etl, and dramatic query functionality are astounding. In the right hands you can do truly amazing things.
That said, there are some great cloud analytics offerings which are going to compete.
Let's stipulate that excel gives you all the chart-formatting crap you need. Is that a reason to pull in a million rows, which is what GP is about? Surely a chart with a million things displayed is going to be awful, no matter how well formatted. A simple shell script could save these users hours of work, every time they touch this godawful sheet. Actual analytics tools would be even better.
Why would you do any of that when it opens up fine in Excel? A chart doesn't display a million things, it summarizes it. End users aren't going to be pumping stuff through shell scripts, and I personally am not in the business of writing office suite software. If people can get what they want, easily without my intervention by paying MS I am all for it. Also I don't want to support the sales department when my bash script streaming their stuff to Spark fails.
The truth is that Excel is easier to learn than programming. Call it 'graphical programming' if you will, but Microsoft did build a very powerful piece of software that performs fantastically great for many data tasks. And many many 3rd parties built extensions (data import, cleanup/statistics, formulas and logical programs) that Just Work.
I live mostly in a land of Unix pipes and vim, but I get it. Excel is a low-abstraction (everything is visualized!) graphical programming environment that the business world loves.
But the excel replacement is a 3 year IT project with a 60% chance to fail and an enormous budget. By the time it is done, the user will have forgotten what this project was even for.
Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.
Part of the promise of cloud based document solutions, to my eyes, is being able to replace "edge databases" with user-facing user-editable spreadsheets.
Drain those IT projects of risk, get moving early, with a structure that lets the user guide the data modelling... Could be a nice local minimum :)
Agree. Well, ideally you would want to give a path for non technical users to do more than spreadsheets. That was the promise of hyper-card, VBA, etc. But that's not the direction of the world anymore, quite the opposite.
Nowadays you have JS to automate Google and MS docs, but 1) Javascript is kinda warty for VBA-type users, 2) API driven javascript is less friendly than the locally-logical VBA-style access, and 3) the mental barriers to entry are much higher than older solutions to the same issues...
In theory we should be approaching data-nirvana for end users. In reality it takes a lot of tech know how to bridge those gaps in the modern Enterprise and you're getting almost no help from the big boys.
Empirically we buy a company, tell the accounting team that we are changing to gsuite and see if the CTO gets fired, or the accounting team quits, or the company gets a hit.
I'd leave a moderately-sized (like 5 pages) work gdoc page open on my work machine at Google and come back the next day and it was using 1gb of RAM. Fantastic is certainly one word for it.
Collab tools are fabulous no doubt, but sheets feels entirely neglected and basic.
Permissions model is clunky and gsuite governance is nonexistent - you have to buy a CASB license to do anything effectively.
It's not a bad suite, I just think it's confused on some areas (don't even get me started on the chat/conference systems tho)
One issue currently preventing our move is the lack of a true desktop app. Sometimes you just need the native windows experience instead of your browser taking up even more ram to open a spreadsheet.
Libreoffice and Sheets are both dead in the water non starters for all of the finance guys that I know.
The ability to open a million line csv file with 75 columns and execute a search and replace without leaking battery acid out of every orifice in your machine.
The hundreds of long complex well vetted plug ins that are drop and play with Excel which serve niche hard to reason about corners of regulation legalese. There has been so much cross pollination between the major firms that everybody has these tools and implements their own little tweaks.
The ability to quickly spin up a VBA macro to do some heavy lifting in a client provided 250 worksheet workbook each with 50000 line items (none escape quoted so every address with a comma in it malformed the data on client export).
That is my experience too, and I also find LibreOffice to be much faster than Excel for huge datasets. The biggest difference for me is clearly file compatibility and that is why I still use mostly Excel.
WHAT? CSV support in Excel is just completely broken. Million line CSVs are the only reason I have LO on my machine.
If LO would just make .xlsx a native format, they could probably take some market share from Excel. But, as long as there are little issues with interoperability, 100% of the world will be on Excel. Alas.
For me personally, sheets is fine although slow. For our finance people, vba and dynamics GP integration is a requirement.
We switched from o365 to gsuite in the last year, and have run into some things that make it feel like gsuite isn’t quite polished as a business product. Examples off the top of my head:
- Can’t share individual folders from a team drive. Not a dealbreaker, but hobbles g drive as a Dropbox replacement.
- Email to a suspended user bounces. In exchange, the mail goes through but access is cut off.
- inviting a google group to a meeting doesn’t work as smoothly as inviting an exchange group
- can’t delegate account access administratively, need to do it from the user account
There are big pluses too, and overall I’m not sad we switched. But it feels like MS has a much better handle on what corporate IT needs.
Desktop email clients like Outlook let you do things such as: select all email messages -> save as .txt -> feed the .txt to a python script that extracts useful data.
If we were using GSuite I guess we could use the Gmail API to get the message body data, but at the end of the day having local access is just more convenient (edit: faster).
Edit: for everything else that is not email (spreadsheet, word processor, presentations) there are also similar advantages related to having full fledged desktop applications.
We do clustering on unstructured text and we output data in a Jupyter notebook. It's a proof of concept for now and the production pipeline will be a bit different. The whole Python ecosystem is awesome for this type of prototyping.
The answer to this is fairly simple: Offline access to email. You need a client for this, and an arbitrary browser won't do.
Solved problem on iOS and Android with whatever mail app you want to use, but those are of course apps.
Solved problem on the PC with Outlook or "Gmail Offline", but "Gmail Offline" is a chrome-only feature so is, as far as I'm concerned, an offline email client built into Chrome, not a feature of Gmail per-se. See also: Any IMAP mail client.
Companies have so much fear when it comes to email. We've been on Rackspace Hosted Exchange for almost a decade. The plan is to move to O365 this year. And to get it directly from Microsoft, and roll our Office licenses into it.
We get Office + email for just a hair more than we pay now, and we don't have to deal with the dinks at Rackspace when we have issues with it. I'm sure Microsoft support isn't perfect, but why go through a middleman.
Ummmmm, dinks? Seriously. Rackspace has legendary support. You call, and in three rings or less there is a skilled English speaking dude who knows what’s up. That is their entire value prop.
Not the experience on the email platform, you get a note taker that passes it on, level 1 techs on the email platform don't even know how to parse `host -t mx hostname.com`. You insist on same day escalation to be refused. After hunting down an escalation email Bill or Bob comes in on Monday eastern times, sorts it, apologises and then says a complaint is unwarranted and shit happens (i.e. a weekend of downtime for our client) and let's all be professional. Fuck Rackspace - their down fall is well deserved.
Not our experience, certainly not outside of working hours, refusal to escalate until level 3 staff return working hours, which on a weekend is a lot of downtime
Most of these credits are rolled into your licensing agreement, even with a $20k/year SME open value I recall us getting like 4 tickets free. They aren't just tickets, at 4am in the morning with a botched Exchange upgrade (it was our fault in the end we overlooked something with certs) you have a case manager on the phone (calling you back and a direct number to him/her) then they forward you as required, you end up essentially talking to one of Exchange developers if required. The escalation path, speed, and knowledge are seriously awesome.
> The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing
Like Microsoft 365, which is a superset of Office 365, and includes Windows licensing for desktops, along with the other "nice to haves" from the Azure AD premium suite, like Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and the Enterprise Mobility suite stuff. Oh, and an OMA DM compliant MDM suite with DLP and ...
I work in this space, and it seems like the "365" suite is rapidly becoming an incredibly well integrated kitchen-sink approach to end-users software & devices.
AWS should partner with Apple (like all their other enterprise partnerships) to hawk iOS and Mac devices as a complete solution. Although it would only really work if AWS goes further up the stack from IaaS.
I just noticed that One Drive includes 1 TB of cloud storage -- compare that to the 30 GB we get with Google's business suite. No wonder all our employees also have a separate Dropbox subscription. That's a cost savings to get something like lots of cloud storage in addition to office applications -- it's more of a Dropbox + Google replacement. I wonder if in practice it is as nice as Dropbox + Google.
> Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo.
Microsoft is its own worst enemy - Windows usability has been going down the drain in recent years (is it possible that the desktop has been neglected due to the new emphasize on enterprise and the cloud?), and people get used to alternative OS's via Android.
The looming threat to Windows is the post-"PC" device space. The mobile Office offerings on iOS definitely leave much to be desired, and there's an opening for a "mobile-first" approach to data that extends to the future of human-computer interfaces
Who is working in a "mobile-first" office, though? Last I saw, almost everyone is still working in an office where people use PCs - some with Macbooks, perhaps, but still not many. The mobile use case for Office is making quick changes to a document or reading something you've been sent, not your everyday work.
I also work for a massive institution with around 50,000 employees, a large portion of whom are Windows users. It was just announced within the last couple of months that we will be switching from Microsoft Office to Google. It seems like a massive undertaking to me and I’m not entirely sure of the reasoning behind it, but it is safe to say cost is front and center.
You make an excellent point wrt discounts. We are often puzzled by unsound technical choices that make little sense until you realize the decision is not an isolated event.
Everything makes sense. If it doesn't, it's because you are missing something.
Just like most stocks did. One of my pet peeves in articles like this and the Facebook one on the front page that assume every single change in a company's stock is a direct result of something a company did that week. Pretty useless when they don't take into account what the market in general is doing.
Nearly every article that attempts to explain the movement of a stock price is sensationalist. There are occasional times when there is a clear cause and effect, but usually there are a million different things going on and trying to tie it back to a single cause is hopeless.
I notice that they are careful to phrase it in a way that does not explicitly describe cause and effect. Here, the headline merely states that one thing happened, then another. Any causality is inferred by the reader. But of course the reader will infer causality, and the writers know it, and cultivate it.
That's financial news every day. They make up nonsense to associate with stock/market movements. Last week, it was FB being down because of issues. Nevermind the entire market was down. And if the dow is down .05% for the day, they'll make up something to state the reason for it.
Everyday on bloomberg, cnbc, etc, they said "the dow or some stock" is down for X reason but that's nonsense. If the talking heads at bloomberg, cnbc, etc knew the reasons for daily stock/market moves, then they wouldn't be working as journalists. They'd be making bank on wall street.
On a somewhat unrelated note, does anybody else despise the new Techcrunch design? I scrolled below the article for a second, then back up, and somehow I was no longer on the MS article, but rather watching a Fitbit Versa review.
What Microsoft needs to do is make UWP APIs on par with Win32 APIs. Also, the reason why so many companies wrote custom apps for windows was because of VB. They need to make it so that you can write code and compile it to a single executable without the framework tacked on that is as easy and powerful as VB was. This will get them back in the game and push them over the 1 trillion hump.
Mainly because of their cloud business, which I feel is a fair evaluation.
Azure is widening the gap between 2nd and 3rd place in cloud hosting, while also making huge gains in cloud services, which is something AWS doesn't have.
I mainly meant Office 365 & SharePoint, but there is a growing list of services above the infrastructure layer that Azure is leading in as well, like identity (Active Directory), hybrid cloud, Dynamics CRM and BI/data processing.
It depends on what you're managing. I really yearn for Amazon's ability to check resources or check all of them in a certain view and apply a certain action to all of them, similar to typical webmail interfaces. Azure's is much more oriented around interacting with single resources at a time.
Sure. But when there’s such a massive movement with no change in fundamentals just because MS said something, you can’t help but wonder. I think these large companies do this pretty often, although rarely with such dramatic effect.
Question: has Microsoft ever been second to the product party by more than 3 years, and won? What about on sever and tools?
Bing, windowsphone, Zune, ie, are all end-user facing failures—none of which were based initially on in-house innovation.
My concern is with Azure, and I want to believe 1) that cloud is not winner take all and 2) that microsoft won’t fatally trip over itself as it tries to learn what the market wants.
Please help me with fodder to form my own opinion on whether Azure can ever be more than a bundled tie-in (Azure sales ~= Azure utilization) like our old friend Sharepoint.
Back when I was still a cool kid, the biggest worry for a lot of companies was Microsoft deciding to enter your space. Bottomless war chest, an army of programmers and a finely tuned sales channel meant that all their new initiatives started at +20 points.
SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc. If they didn't have it, they bought a company that did have it - and then used their 800lbs of brute market muscle to make it into the dominant offering.
Excel started on Mac and as ported to Windows afterwards.
Visicalc was never ported to Windows, while Lotus never managed the transition in a good way.
WordPerfect was the king of wordprocessors in text based OSes, took too long to accept the world had gone GUI and was quite arrogant to their customers. There is even a book about its downfall, " Almost Perfect".
Sometimes Microsoft does not need to make too much effort, when their competition is good killing their own jewels.
MS should make windows free and just charge for services. I’d love it if they made SQLServer free (sans support or add paid support that actually is good not outsourced) too but that’s a pipe dream.
Windows is pretty much already free if you are not a business. Just download Windows10 ISO from MS and install it on your home PC.
You will not be prompt to activate it and it will not ever lock itself. Only thing you cannot do is change your "Personalisation Settings" e.g. remove stupid "recomendations" on your Start, change desktop background etc.. Also you will have small overlay on bottom left corner saying "Windows is not activated" or smth.
Mssql is significantly more expensive to run than postgres, Mongo, dynmodb, or mysql when you need a real sql server. This is true for both self hosted and cloud solutions.
Dynmodb in AWS offers 25gb free. That's twelve times the storage without charging you a dime.
Dynamo db is not cheap at all. Writes are expensive and the structure of Dynamo is far from flexible and very limited in regards to querying. I don’t know what the usecase is for it.
Dynamo db handles burst traffic (scaling up and down on server count) better than mssql. Dynamo also handles big data better than sql.
The last time I tried (2015) no amount of indexing or sharding was allowing for decent performance on joins across tables with 300+ million rows in sql server. I've seen dynmodb used in map reduce functions with more data.
Dynamo also doesn't completely suck at typical transcational work, and it's convient to have one datasource across the warehouse and application layers.
When I worked in Australia we had a client with ~1.5tb database in SQL Server, largest main table was about 2.5b records. Had no problem returning joined records in low ms times. Wouldn't be good if it had really high traffic but we wrote about ~1-2m records per day into the tables without issue reading it out.
SQL Server can perform. But requires a lot of massaging.
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We tried using DynamoDB for logging, not sure why but the team had trouble with document sizes, write limits, in the end it was growing and going to cost more than SQL Server, was replaced with logging to PostgreSQL with much more flexibilty and runs on a t2.micro instance without issue.
The bigger question in my mind is whether MSFT will reach a $1T market cap because it is essentially behaving like a banker and moving money around, or whether it will genuinely innovate to expand its revenue.
If it is the former they are vulnerable to their souffle collapsing.
The typical hypey techcrunch headline belies the fact that MSFT is reapproaching where it was two weeks ago in the markets.
Thank you, this was the context I was missing. I'd be curious what the requirements are for public companies to report gains from these types of investments.
Is there any chance Microsoft will take a strong stance on privacy like Apple? They seem to have strong business models besides ads so they can avoid becoming a data grubbing pile of crap.
They sued the government to keep from handing over customer data stored overseas. Isn't that a pretty strong stance on privacy?
They could certainly strengthen their stance in some areas, though, such as by including Bitlocker in all versions of Windows and using strong E2E encryption in Skypep. But I'm not sure that the majority of people would use Bitlocker anyway.
I am using a lot of open source (e.g. Linux) and if I have the choice I mostly don't use Microsoft software. Nevertheless, I don't really care if Microsoft will sunset at some point in the future.
In fact, I care about being able to keep my data private and be able to use my services independently. As long as that is possible I am okay with Microsoft/Google/Amazon selling others their golden cloud services. It is more a live and let live attitude.
Agreed. But it’s every major player in tech. I wish the political desire to regulate markets existed. We have these huge corporations, and few else. They just don’t employ enough people, and their products leave people wanting.
As far as seeing anyone sunset, I don’t. But I do hope to see the end to homelessness and needless brutalism.
The key is tying these services to discounts on Windows licensing. We're buying them anyway so no matter what Google offers us they can't beat the cost savings Microsoft can provide. Same with AWS vs Azure — we can use our volume licensing in the cloud with Azure where with other providers we'd have to pay through the nose.
Until Windows is threatened, this will be the status quo. And I think that disruption will take quite a while.