Comment by Johnny555
1 day ago
The problem is that Google only covers "most of it", so even if it covers 99% of use cases, for that cases where it doesn't, companies still need MS Office.
I worked for a startup that was all OSX desktops and Google Docs. Then when we hit 100 employees, the finance department required MS Office, so they used Office for Mac, then as we grew, they needed real MS Office running in Windows, so they ran Windows in Parallels, then as we continued to grow they moved to full Windows laptops. When I left the company (at around 1000 employees), almost a third of the company was on Windows (mostly in Finance, Sales, and other business departments). And the team supporting the 2/3 Mac desktops was about 1/3 the size of the team supporting Windows.
Though I suppose it's easier for a government to move off Microsoft. When an investor tells you to use their financial modeling software that only works with MS Excel, it's pretty hard for a small company to refuse, but a government has more power to force others to conform to their choice.
Any insight in to why the finance department (and other departments) required MS office?
Their initial need for Office was some soft of forecasting model that they needed to update for a large investor. That was a big spreadsheet that ran on Office for OSX if I remember correctly. After that, I don't know what specifically they needed to use, they had purchased some software that required Windows and Office.
Call me cynical, but having been around the block a few times when I hear "need" and "require" my brain translates that to "want" and "it would be convenient if". I've done my share of forecasting for investors and am quite confident that there is nothing in any startup forecast that could conceivably "require" Windows. I mean, absolute worst case, just use SQL.
The CFO just preferred Windows, that's it, I'd bet money on it.
2 replies →
For a power user, There is nothing even remotely comparable to Excel that exists today.
Not anymore. Today I tried to copy paste a string of 15 ascii characters into an Excel cell. Excel spun around for 20 seconds then blurted out an error that "the data is too big". I hit F2 (enter cell Edit Mode), pasted the 15 characters in the edit window and this was I was able to get the data in the cell.
Excel has gone downhill massively.