Yeah, in the past few years I've garnered a reputation in my company for certain types of things and it's led to me working on some massive projects (hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars) and in my new job, one of my primary duties is looking at costs and finding ways to cut them.

For a large enterprise, we're literally talking 10's of millions of dollars in savings when you figure in hardware, licensing, maintenance, security, and support. It's significant enough to shake up the market significantly.

That being said, I work on fed gov a lot and they still use MS. Money is no object for them. ;)

$43.00


https://www.g2deal.com/microsoft-off...ebb471#EDMonly

:thumb: Well done.

The problem is that Microsoft had a 25-year head start on developing all of their software, so it's super tough for others to catch up. If your needs are pretty basic, Google or Open Office work fine. I can't imagine trying to do my work in anything other than Word, PowerPoint or Excel, though. There's just too much missing in other options.

I'd much rather use the free Microsoft stuff than the other options, personally.

Same here. It’s not just that they dominate the field and their product is needed if you want to be compatible with everyone else. It’s also that their products are so damn good. Excel is one of the, if not the, most robust business and academic tools ever created.

That gap is closing.

Believe it or not, one of the big drivers right now is collaboration.

Sharepoint + Office is a freaking disaster. Overwrites, lockouts, version control, sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

Google Docs just plain work. You can have 3 or 4 people editing the same doc in real time and no issues.

Oh and speaking of collaboration, MS Teams is ****ing awful.

This is an overstatement.

There is lag and latency on Google Docs unless your entire team is on a T-4 superspeed pipeline

Not true.

There are enterprises out there with 40K home office workers using Google docs because Sharepoint simply doesn't work with that kind of setup.

And for the record, I personally HATE Google. I'm an Apple guy myself.

But professionally, I've seen what works and what doesn't. Google is rapidly closing the gap and Microsoft is pricing itself right out of the marketplace.

Actually, Teams has been a lifesaver for us. It's worked very well, after a few initial hiccups. We use it constantly.

Same. Ditto for SharePoint/OneDrive, though we do have weird conflicts from time to time. Not near enough to be a major problem, though.

We've dumped our entire file server at this point, and it's been fine.

It does help that we're a small office of relatively tech savvy folks, so it's easy to train people on where to find stuff. That would be considerably more difficult with a ton of people, some of whom should be featured on those Progressive commercials.

You may (or may not) be shocked to know how many tech-dumb people work for tech companies. It's pretty crazy to see some of the questions that come across our support channels. Basic stuff that most professionals should know, tech or not.

So yeah, scale of the operation has a lot to do with it. In a large organization, MS has a lot of issues. It just doesn't scale well.

Excel was created right as I got out of college and I got assigned to learn it in my first job. It's been my main work tool (along with Word) for over 30 years now. It's kind of amazing to think about.

Interesting.

We use primarily WebEx and Bluejeans but also have experience with Teams, Zoom, GoTo, and several others.

Teams hardly ever works well enough. WebEx tends to be the most reliable. We've moved several Teams installations to other platforms.