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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

The viable alternative is Google Workspace.

At most companies, a small percentage of employees will still need Excel for really complex/large spreadsheets, or Word for complex formatting destined for publication. But for 95% of people Google's good enough or better.

Year after year, Google keeps stealing more of Microsoft's customers, and it's extremely common for new companies to adopt Google rather than Microsoft.

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It seems MS is winning in the Education space - the existing mindshare for MS Office means it's hard to accept free Google Workspace and the learning curve that might come from that vs. M365 with the free desktop Office licenses they give out to every student and teacher.

> It seems MS is winning in the Education space

Which country, and what level of education? In the US, cheap Chromebooks with GSuite have taken over K-12

Germany. Since Corona, Teams is suddenly everywhere.

Google is absolutely dominating the K-12 education market.

I would think tertiary matters a lot more than k-12

I’d agree, as it is one step closer to the labor market, and Enterprise is the goose with the golden eggs. But is Microsoft really dominant in tertiary?

That's a great point, and when I think about it I can only remember using google docs. Even if I could have afforded excel (I'm sure they give it to students for free), google docs was way easier for working on a team.

And nowadays, I use excel (in part because I don't really work in a cloud-friendly industry).

So I guess my point falls apart pretty hard.

You'll see that collapse when Google faces a few more privacy lawsuits and schools realize forcing their students into Google's system likely isn't legal. There are already a few cases in process about it.

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