361–370 of 593 posts
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One word. Cloud. Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.
Ok, but surely google docs does that just as well or even better? I have never even heard of sharepoint and onedrive!
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> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft. I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, co…
There’s plenty of developer talent. You don’t see microsoft office competitors because it’s a bad business to start. “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work. I’m sure dozens of people have tried.
> number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off
There aren’t the same thing.
> “Remake microsoft office suite, but cheaper” won’t work
Probably not. But adapt open-source software for New Zealand’s government can. It just takes a rare combination of technical skill, executive function, leadership ability and emotional self-control to pull off.
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoin…
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> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!” Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet. The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint. Everything else can be replaced easily and o…
Is there? Maybe Google docs.
It's amazing that Microsoft has, for the most part, not really changed their fundamental office software for over a decade and yet there is very little actual competition. People call it bland but I've yet to see any real competition to the whole package.
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoin…
> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.
It looks like a lot of the project planning SAAS are trying to take the crown too.
It’s just strange that Google seemingly gave up.
Most people using excel and word would be just as functional using office '98. SaaS is largely just a cancer on society. Monthly subscription to pay for features you never use and bug fixes you never should have needed.
They haven't really added anything to Office since 2013, the last pre-subscription version. There were massive changes between Office 98 and 2013, including entirely new programs like OneNote. They just found a way to get their customers to rebuy the same product every year. Same thing happened with Adobe and CS6; feature development slowed to a crawl after the change to a subscription.
running a VM just for occasional office use is annoying to deal with
edit: activation is probs the main issue
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For end-users maybe, but for the business' IT who get a working mail server they don't have to mess with, and a whole remote work and videoconferencing package that "just works" and most people already know how to use, it's a hell of a deal.
Kind of hard to understand what it does that Google Workspace + Zoom (or any other provider) doesn't? I'm seeing a very common pattern of Google Workspace + Google Meet, Zoom seats for people who need to remotely control computers, and then Slack or ones of its competitors for chat.
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoin…
I would prefer unbundling this. I do not use Microsoft Office apps; I use Google Workspace apps which can read those files. I do heavily use OneDrive space though. I want to pay only for that. And cannot. I would love to find a OneDrive replacement that works well both on Linux and Windows (and Android, iOS).
NextCloud?
Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too. The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoin…