Comment by Gud
12 hours ago
Microsoft are wielding the entire office suite as a weapon against free and interoperable formats…
It is the single biggest blocked against open computing.
If Microsoft were serious about open source like another poster claimed, they would let us run it on all platforms.
Much like iOS/Android & the Web killed MSFTs stranglehold on OSes, google docs & markdown killed MSFT office's stranglehold on office. So many businesses are google doc shops, vast majority of schools are google docs, vast majority of casual document usage is google docs and google docs is open-enough with it's export formats.
Excel at this point is specialist software, like adobe photoshop. Everything else is 'good enough'.
I’ve never come across Google docs in the wild in a corporate setting.
Seems to me Microsoft office is still the dominant player.
Anecdata, 10k+ Eng department, it’s all GSuite. Office365 exists as well for external interop but I’ve never seen anyone reach for it due to preference since it existed.
It basically comes down to whether your sales arm demands native Teams and subsequent MSFT stack. Anyone deploying major production in GCP/GKE tends to go full Technical Partner with GOOG, google docs included.
FWIW Docs isn't bad, and slides is... useable, but sheets is a poor excel alternative.
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Microsoft Office is probably still the largest player but a former large company I worked for absolutely used Google for 95% of purposes. I didn't even have a Microsoft Office license. It's very common. If we had to exchange docs with someone that didn't use Google, we'd export formats in some way including, often, to PDF.
Gsuite (including docs) is the norm at most companies I’ve worked at that have been founded since 2010, though the finance depts usually also had their own excel licenses.
That being said, excel itself is still more powerful than google sheets, but the collaborative nature of Gsuite beats the pants off of MS Office, online or native.
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It's all anecdotal, but I haven't seen Microsoft Office in my job since 2010. It's been wall-to-wall Google for the past four companies.
Thoughtworks was on GSuite when I was there.
That's being charitable to OSS office packages' UX.
Some wounds are self-inflicted, and open source has a well-known last-20%-polish problem that's especially painful in mass-user scenarios like office software.
OOo wasting the 00s with a circa-90s UI (and Oracle being assholes) is equally responsible for MS Office's continued popularity in enterprise.
This is not an interface problem but deliberate action to make office formats non-compatible with other software.
Personally I prefer 90s software design over the bloated crap of today.