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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> I can't say MS is better at everything

MS is way better at support, which is a crucial factor in business. Our small company we have found that G Suite had almost non-existent support from Google.

Finding a human at Google to talk to, or even reply to a forum post is very difficult.

if you are paying for google apps, it's insanely easy to talk to Google Support[0].

I've contacted Google Support for a lot of issues (some insanely trivial, and some pretty complicated - both via phone and chat and they have yet to disappoint me).

MS has always been in the enterprise world and they've honed their skills on it. But imo, G Suite is not too far behind when it comes to support - but it is lacking in other areas - like not having native apps.

[0] https://support.google.com/a/?hl=en#topic=29157&contact=1

> 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/), 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.

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

That actually looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.

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.

One of my uncle's companies moved to Teams recently from Zoom (and Hangouts before that) and I once heard quite a lot of praise from him. Can it be used for personal use? Like in peer to peer?

The company I work for just got on teams, and it integrates with our organization at the Active Directory level. We can do personal chats, meetings and messages, but only to others INSIDE our organization. It isn't a deal breaker, but firing up a screenshare/meeting to a vendor is impossible through it.

Thanks for the info. I have yet to get into a job (will be starting this summer) so I didn't know much about this stuff but am excited.

We're actually on Slack instead of Skype. I feel your pain, Skype was definitely annoying when I used to use it long ago. Slack and Hipchat and Google all have their annoyances, too. I haven't been really happy with any instant messenger since the days of AIM when it only tried to do one thing and do it simply.

The client that I am using (which you can download from https://products.office.com/en-us/skype-for-business/downloa...) keeps all conversations in one window with people listed down the left. I've never seen it starting new windows.

This is an option in the client settings - "Enable Tabbed Conversations". I'm pretty sure it defaults to being turned on, because I always have to go in after an update and disable it to get my conversations popping open in separate windows again.

> This is an option in the client settings - "Enable Tabbed Conversations"

Which client? The OSX client appears to have very limited configuration options.

The OSX client is quite awful. But, under Preferences > General, there is a "Show conversations in separate windows" option.

I think there is a setting where you can change the default save location to local. I don't know if it disables the popup though.

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