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.
I've worked—at Google—extensively on documents using Google Docs on a Chromebook and the experience is pretty smooth.
That annoys me the most.
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).
(I'm a Google engineer)
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)
IF neither, Gsuite is ok.
Most of them use iPhones too.
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.
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.
That said, there are some great cloud analytics offerings which are going to compete.
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.
Software development in large corporates is just too slow, costly and unreliable.
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 :)
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.
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.
So now that we’ve removed the need for an arbitrary client in both cases why can’t localStorage/etc solve this to most users satisfaction?
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.
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).
I have 32g of memory and a SSD on this machine. If I attempt to open a 1,000,000 .csv file, add a filter at the top, and attempt to filter by a column, my computer is done. LibreOffice will go gray and never recover no matter how long it is left. Eventually it will crash. Do the same in Excel and it will successfully search the column and return just the line items with said column.
That example is egregious as well. LibreOffice can not handle 500,000 line items files with 30 text heavy columns. It crashes on numerous basic spreadsheet operations, however Excel handles them (and quickly).
I am not a Microsoft shill, I'm running open source from Linux to Ruby/Rust and all the way down to Postgres. I would love nothing more than to stop having to keep a second windows machine setup next to me just to handle large csv files.
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.
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.
Fit a polynomial trendline to a chart.
Choose the number of decimal places when showing a trendline's equation. Copy that equation, without re-typing it yourself.
Apply the solver to a nonlinear-but-continuously-differentiable system of equations.
You know, the stuff I could do in Office '95 on a 120MHz Pentium.