$9.95 a month for Office 365

After MS Office moved to a subscription service, I finally made the switch to OpenOffice.

Highway robbery.

Eh, that's a family license ($69/year for just one), and it comes with 1 TB of OneDrive storage. You'll pay more than that just for Dropbox for the same amount of storage.

This. Google "office", aka "Workspace" is free. Open Chrome browser, click on Google Apps icon on top right, choose Docs, or Sheets, or Slides, etc. Anymore it is as ubiquitous as M$ Office in the workplace, and moreso in startups & education fields.

While this is serviceable for the lightest users, it is a fail for any heavy duty and frequent user.

There isn't a snowballs chance in hell your using Google's office suite for complex Excel tasks or creating a PPT for a presentation.

Open Office isn't much better. :shake:

Google for enterprise is getting much closer. I know a lot of Fortune 100 companies that are switching. The savings can be in the millions of dollars.

I've never used Enterprise version so I won't comment but I'm guessing it's more like Office than Sun's OpenOffice or Googles free stuff. :hmmm:

Agreed, Google shared docs are excellent for collaborating remotely on excel and ppt. They aren't a replacement for M$ though. I always have to convert final copy of Google shared docs to M$ docs.

Interesting. Any guess on what the security is like on G enterprise? How does it make sense to run Windows but not Office in terms of cost, security, and administration?

I can't go into too much detail but for most companies, it's good enough.

For government contracts, there's all kinds of compliance issues so special negotiations are required with Google to make sure instances stay on-shore, aren't accessible by foreign nationals, and comply with certain government security requirements like FISMA, GARM, and ITAR.

Like I said, I know a lot of Fortune 100 companies are switching, including mine.

By the way, if I had to guess, Windows in the enterprise will soon be headed the same way. I see a lot of companies going to alternate solutions. You could see enterprise Chromebooks in the next few years.

The cost differential is just huge. A Chromebook you could literally throw away and replace if it broke. Windows PC's are 10x more costly to support, secure, and admin.

Thanks, good information. It will be interesting to see if G can give M$ the first real competition they’ve had in the office suite space at the enterprise level.

It's all about the costs, honestly.

You know how it is with publicly-traded companies.

This is a perfect example of how competition in the free marketplace drives innovation and improvements. I imagine the corporate IT trend toward lightly managed devices to replace the more expensive PC is a response to the cost factors you cite here.