Comment by novok
2 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd say Word, even the web version is definitely more capable than Google Docs. I don't know that most people need it. I will say that interactive mode in gdocs is slightly better. I also like Outlook slightly better, though I do wish they'd slim it down a bit, it feels bloated.
My last decade has been a mix, some o365, some GDocs. I do wish there was something opened that was nearly as good as Visio myself, rather than renting it as an add-on. diagrams.net/draw.io is pretty good for some things, but Visio has a lot of features that aren't even close. I haven't tried the web version of Visio lately, last I had it was only halfway decent for read-only, but apparently most features now work. So next time I need it in mac/linux it should be an option.
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.
My experience for smaller companies is more like:
- if you have GMail, people(esp engineering) use docs and 1-n people have Excel on top
- if you are all in on MS, then of course no one will use GDocs
I find Docs and Slides are fine and really preferable because they do a good job with 95%+ of the functionality you probably want without word art and stuff like that. Sheets is more stripped down relative to Excel but absent pivot tables and the like, most people don't need that.
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.