Comment by gjsman-1000
3 months ago
To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.
To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365, basically forever. LibreOffice is nowhere near a replacement for Excel in an enterprise setting.
I wouldn't say it's Office365 as much as "What are my other options?"
MacOS is good option BUT cheapest laptop option is 1000 bucks. Dell has 16 inch with 16GB of RAM for 600.
There is Linux but Linux Desktop still is not ready and mass management of it is very painful.
So you default to Windows. It works-ish, won't break the bank and just about every piece of software you need works with it.
Office 365 is absolutely not what you seem to describe. I run a small non-profit and I am banking hard on Office 365 while I use a Mac.
O365 is the Office suite of apps, an Exchange server, OneDrive with a ton of storage, access to unlimited Teams meetings, and tons of doodads and doohickeys we don't need. That my Windows using colleagues could potentially install Enterprise Windows on their own laptops (we're a BYOD employer), is irrelevant for us. Any fleet of trashy PC we need for frontline staff already comes with a Windows license.
I agree with your overall point but I'm starting to regularly see older M series MacBooks on sale for around 600 or 700 dollars brand new. Maybe they are using the strategy of selling older hardware for less like they did with the iPhone SE.
Cheapest 16GB of RAM (Minimum I think for most workers) is 759 for 13 inch M3 Macbook Air. 15 Inch is 929.
That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.
4 replies →
Mac costs more but are easier to support from an IT perspective, at least that's what many say.
I work in a large enterprise and I see more and more people move to macOS every year. We use Office 365. I run the Office apps on my Mac. We backup with OneDrive. We collaborate with SharePoint. We use our AD accounts to login on macOS, use InTune to manage endpoints. My Mac even has Defender on it now.
Microsoft is still getting their money, just slightly less from Windows itself.
I’m willing to bet it’s about the hardware. Windows laptops almost all universally suck in at least a few areas: display, touchpad and wake from sleep at the most inconvenient times. Give me a MacBook which natively boots Windows and I’ll use it, if only because it has WSL2. If it boots Linux, even better. (Naturally, those three usually broken things must work on either.)
It depends on the industry... go to any (non-ms based) tech company and every developer will want a mac. Nobody will chose windows if asked.
Other less developer related companies are moving more towards mac as well.
This is just my anecdote between being in/out of tech for the last 25 years and have gone from: "Here is your windows laptop" to "Do you want windows or macos" to "here is your macbook"
Now, if they would just give us the Max.
1 reply →
Most of the office apps sans excel are basically just the web apps though, office 365 for the most part is cross platform.
LibreOffice is not a real contender to replace MS Office. The real alternatives are:
- OnlyOffice - WPS Office - Google Docs.
> To the average consumer, Windows doesn't matter much anymore.
> To enterprises, Microsoft has them under lock and key with Office 365
In between are a bazillion businesses who depend on couple of apps and/or devices that are Windows only or near enough.
Large enterprises are switching to Google Sheets. The largest private employer in Australia, for example, pretty much has switched to Sheets now.