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).<p>It's the typical situation: no user uses more than 5% of Excel's functionality -- but users don't use the same 5%.<p>Where G Suite is great is 3rd party integrations, especially ones targeting small/mid size companies.
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?<p>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...
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.<p>Sheets has problems well documented online for years. No recent activity on them whatsoever.<p>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.<p>Directory doesn't even have calendar-integrated birthdays, something which is basic in a company.<p>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...<p>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?<p>Or should we cut our losses and switch now?
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.<p>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.
Just this morning I found myself unable to switch between two Google Drive accounts, because both of them had the same domain, @gmail.com.<p>Signing out of a single account leads to all accounts being signed out. Gmail was launched 12 years ago.<p>Why, Google, why?
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.<p>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.<p>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.
One of my biggest frustrations running my business on G Suite is knowing if the product is something Google seriously cares about.<p>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.<p>One example of Google not prioritizing desktop software: <i>finally</i> 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?
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: <a href="http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/" rel="nofollow">http://us.spindices.com/indices/equity/sp-composite-1500/</a>
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.
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.<p>Native apps forever (or until the infrastructure is built out more at least.)
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.
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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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"?<p>/rant
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?
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.<p>And Microsoft has actual reliable support, unlike Google. It makes a difference when selling into large companies.
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.<p>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.<p>Editing becomes hellish (with visible latency) if I type more than a couple of pages (I'm journalist by day).<p>It's not that Google Drive is better than O365. EVERYTHING is better than O365.
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...
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.
While I use some Google products (AppEngine, GCP, Play movies+music), I don't think they compete with Office 365 where for $99/year family plan my wife and I each get 1 TB cloud storage and all the Office apps that we use on Mac laptops, Android phones, and our iPads. Such a good deal, and once when I needed customer service it was there and someone helped within a few minutes.
May be some big company has access to Google. But Microsoft has much better support for the rest of us, SME or Large Enterprise.<p>And Google simply dont "get" it. Not Business, Not Enterprise.<p>Newest Office is pretty nice, they finally refined Ribbon to a point where it is half usable. And Hosted Exchange is simply much better then Gmail. Having used IBM Notes, Gmail and Exchange, I am surprised Exchange works better with iOS out of the box.<p>I was actually looking for some light weight alternative to Office, Exchange Email, One Drive. But i have find none so far. There may be services that individually works better then Office counterpart, but as a package it seems M$ Ecosystem is hard to beat right now.
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.
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.
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?<p>Is it because the statistics come out in M$ favor when only looking at the 1500 bracket rather than 500 or 2000? Hmm...