[yobbo]

People are now starting careers as Office 365 "officers". From now until retirement, they will champion Office 365 and its successors in all situations, because in effect they will be championing their own CVs.

Just like people did with IBM, Oracle, J2EE, and so on.

If at one point Google Apps is superior to Office 365 makes no difference.

The insight is that the careerists are the effective insider salesmen of enterprise software. Not specs, benchmarks, stats or anything like that.

[hnarn]

Why can’t multiple things be true at the same time?

The idea of product “officers” can be bizarre and counter productive, while that product simultaneously can be one of the best in the market.

I’m not saying that O365 is great, I use it at work and I hate it, but enterprise software has always been like this: it’s not enough to be better, you need to be something like 3x better, but if you are it doesn’t matter if you’re going up against Microsoft. Software is a lot more competitive in that way than a lot of other industries.

[yobbo]

The pain occurs because of the symbiosis between technical lock-in and careerists.

If a tech company has achieved both technical and organizational lock-in (or maybe "capture"), specs don't matter.

[scarface74]

It doesn’t matter if Google Apps itself is superior. Google is not exactly known for its enterprise support. You also can’t count on the long term focus of Google. You know when you buy into the MS ecosystem you are going to get great enterprise support, they don’t have the attention span of a crack addled flea like Google does, it’s going to integrate well with the rest of their products, you get deep discounts from bundling.

Specs and benchmarks only matter to geeks.