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Comment by nkw | Hacker News Reader

I don't really get why this is that useful. Except maybe the Gmail/Dropbox integration. Our office pays for 1) G Suite - from which we use Gmail and Calendar, 2) Dropbox for Business for file storage/sync, 3) Office 365 for Word and Excel, and 4) Slack.

I would really really like to give my money to one company, except Google Docs/Drive sucks (er, doesn't meet our use case), Office 365 - Outlook sucks (in comparison to Gmail) as well as whatever the Microsoft file syncing option is (OneDrive?). Our Dropbox for Business comes up for renewal this month and Google and Microsoft's file sync stuff isn't remotely comparable. Same for Slack vs the Hangouts incarnation of the moment.

I primarily blame Google. We are probably paying an extra $500/user/year because outside of Gmail and Calendar the other G Suite services are pretty awful in comparison to their competition. It is super frustrating.

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I feel like the GSuite product experiences outside of Mail and Calendar still feel really unrefined for a company of the size, scale, and capability of Google. They've had the opportunity to absolutely crush the productivity / work suite of apps, and yet somehow for all their resources and prowess, they've not been able to produce products that are truly _compelling_ options vs Office and Slack. Maybe there's a "yet" at the end of that, but as time marches on, it feels less likely for some reason.

Is it possible the "movers" (individuals with the passion, drive, skillset, etc. to push a product forward) avoid GSuite and similar projects like the plague? Google undoubtedly has a lot of talent at their disposal, what are they working on? GCP? Cars?

It probably sounds odd, but I think Google is not good at doing large complex projects that require considerable man power and time.

And that's what you need to refine products to the next level (or go into billion dollar markets).

It's partially due to the promotion system, partially due to bring allergic to top down management, paired with some arrogance.

Best example are their numerous failed attempts to do payments. Apart from search and ads (which have strong leadership) the examples are legion.

Are you including gDocs and gSheets in that? They seem adequately polished to me (I know the serious Excel user won't be switching any time soon, but for lots of "just put it in a spreadsheet" uses gSheets is fine). And of course time will tell if they have managed to finally make a Slack-killer with Hangouts Chat[1].

1: https://gsuite.google.com/products/chat/

The primary roadblock for us is gDocs. Sheets would probably meet our needs because spreadsheet aren't really a core need, however word processing/documents are our lifeblood. While gDocs has improved it doesn't come close to Word for us. It isn't just that it is a web app -- the Office 365 web based Word actually would be usable for us vs. the desktop apps. That fact is actually pretty amazing to me, I would not have anticipated that to ever be the case when Microsoft first put out their web based version of Word. As it happens a while back I mentioned on here one of the big bugs/lack features that kept us from using the web based Word and some guy from Microsoft asked for more details and then the issue was resolved a few weeks later. That was pretty surprising and impressive to me.

I have no doubt Google has the talent and ability to make Docs competitive, but for some reason it is just not a priority for them.

I'm going to look at Hangouts Chat, but we had a particularly painful process (for no technological reason) when we migrated from using Hangouts for IM to Slack and I don't really look forward to the eye-rolls that are going to come with "Remember Hangouts? We're going back..." even if the Hangouts Chat is an entirely different product. But that is our issue.. Kudos to Google if it can eliminate the need for Slack.

Strange that you're downvoted. Everyone I know is in the same position.

Office 365 for Office apps because they are standard and available offline.

GSuite for better email, calendar and web-based real-time collaboration.

Slack because it has the most integrations at this point.

Box (or Dropbox) for file syncing because their apps are nicer and faster, although Dropbox controls are subpar compared to Box. Both will exist for a long time since OneDrive is utter crap and GSuite Drive File Stream is extremely slow and unreliable.

> OneDrive is utter crap

Can you explain what's crappy about OneDrive. I've not used dropbox much but it looked/worked similar to onedrive. Just trying to understand the problems I'm unable to recognize by not using dropbox

I own and use Office365 home edition as well as Business Essentials account and use OneDrive from both accounts

OneDrive does nothing well. The syncing app is incredibly slow to pickup changes, often stalls or results in conflicts, and the MacOS version is much worse than the Windows version. The web UI is built from parts of Sharepoint and is slow and unintuitive.

Things have improved in the last year but you would have to use the other apps to really see the difference. Dropbox is still ahead of the others in terms of syncing tech with apps that reliably update changes within seconds. I can save a file and have the latest status reflected by the time I switch over to my browser and refresh the web UI.

Thank you for the insight. I will give dropBox a try. I currently don't have automatic Syncing enabled on my desktop which explains why I could not see Onedrive the way you did.

Hey! Are you me?

We have a similar situation for a company of ~100 across 4 offices (2 in NA, and 2 in EU)

Have you looked at Microsoft teams product as a replacement for slack?

Not much beyond looking at the product pages. The only piece of Office 365 that we are in love with is Word. Slack is the choice right now for us because we can use G Suite as our identity provider for SSO and the Slack integrations that are available for other products we use as well as our internal system.

The effort barrier just to get Office 365 to use G Suite for SSO keeps us from seriously deploying any of the other Office 365 features. It seems MS has made setting that up particularly annoying while almost all other app/providers have made it blissfully simple. We would probably be more likely to move to the new Hangouts Chat as a slack replacement, just because we are much more likely to continue to use Gmail/Calendar vs ever moving to Outlook 365/Exchange.

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