[CharlesW]

> It's also much more usable cross platforms than the nightmare that is MS Office. Outlook is terrrrrrrrible.

In what way? I’ve used both Google Workspace and Office 365 during my career. I don’t dislike Google Workspace, but Office 365 is notably more mature, capable, and complete. (I mostly use Macs, but the web apps work the same on any browser/OS.)

[lultimouomo]

Does this include Meet vs Teams? Because Teams is the absolute worst piece of technology I am forced to use regularly. And this includes WebEx!

Also, and I'll never get tired of saying it, if you have both a personal and a business-managed Microsoft account you better give up computers and be a hunter gatherer, it'll save you a world of pain.

[TheNewsIsHere]

My experience matches yours. I loved Google Workspace at a small nonprofit. But if you’re running a business that has “hardcore admin needs” on the productivity services side, MS365 beats the pants off Google Workspace all day.

Tools like GAM used to make things easier and expose just how much UI Google never bothered to write, but at least as of this year I can’t find a feature in Google Workspace that isn’t in MS365, plus you have -all- of Azure right there.

[tomjen3]

The webapps for MS works terrible on Linux and there isn't a native client (Word _native_ is pretty good for Mac).

[solardev]

Really? Surely you're joking..? I've had the complete opposite experience, and in fact have never found a piece of productivity software as horrible as Office 365. Also on a Mac...

Email: Outlook UI and hotkeys are totally different from MacOS, Windows, and Web. Rules don't really work and are impossible to debug. Search is terrible. Threading is terrible (expands the subjects of each child message, but not their bodies... whyyyy).

Calendar: How the heck do you find an event you previously declined but changed your mind on? Why does Teams and Outlook both offer a calendar, with subtly different UIs and features, and the web interface is totally different yet again? It is incredibly slow (things take multiple seconds, like loading someone else's calendar, or clicking on an event it has to take time to load in the attendees...). The "suggested times" feature is hard to find and there's no visual guide (like a week view); also it again seems different between the apps.

Teams: Oh god. This... is what they came up with? It's sooooo slow on startup. It duplicates Outlook notifications. It is hard to find the meeting you're supposed to join when you first clicked on a join link, but then it asks you to login, etc. It's so much less feature-ful than Zoom, yet so much harder to use (and uglier) than Meet. Why do the chat rooms persist not only after a meeting but get resurrected later in the week, and why do they notify you for chats in a meeting that you're not even in. The share screen sidebar is atrociously hard to see to determine which window you're trying to share. Like... literally all the basics they got wrong, and this one software has the worst UX of anything I've seen.

Excel, Word, etc.: My god, the UI has gotten even worse, the forced OneDrive integration is terrible, etc...

I grew up using Microsoft stuff until Google started popularizing their online suite. In the years since, every employer except this most recent one has used Google and while it never struck me as particularly pretty, it was pretty easy to use for the most part. I was actually kinda curious to try the Microsoft stuff again, figured they had 20 years to catch up, it's gotta be better now, right? Nope. I've never hated a stack as much as this, even as a long-time Windows user... in fact it's going to be one of my questions for employers in the future, and a big red flag.

Sorry, I know I sound pretty agitated about this. Their software griefs me on a daily basis and is the single thing I hate the most about my job. It's just SO terrible. I guess YMMV, eh? I didn't realize there were actually people out there who preferred the Microsoft stuff... of the folks I've spoked to casually, all vastly preferred Google's implementations. But that's just anecdotal.

[cosmodisk]

A lot,if not all, of what you wrote here is true and I experienced some of it both as the end user and as an admin. However what are the alternatives for a business where most users sit on Windows? Google suite is a joke for anything but simplest tasks and config is lacking. Yes, Microsoft can be cumbersome, bloated,but it has to support 5 people shops to enterprises with tens of thousands of users and config complexities.

[solardev]

I guess I've never seen a business actually use Microsoft Office effectively. The odd PowerPoint or Word doc? The standalone apps work OK alongside Google, or people just send PDFs anyway. For actual collaboration, especially real-time, Docs and Sheets and Drive and Slides are soooooo much better to work with. Even if they are less feature packed, they do the basics much better.

But that is just my experience primarily working in web teams or small biz. Maybe there are enterprise features that I've never used or even thought about.

As for admin, I've been the gsuite admin (again just for smaller companies) and found it quite powerful, but the use cases are probably different. A lot of these companies basically use the computers as dumb terminals, where the browser is the only thing that really matters. And Chrome federated management makes that pretty easy.

[cosmodisk]

I work at non tech company. A lot of( if not most) interactions with the outside world are based on Microsoft products: meetings, file exchanges, or even collaboration. Some things work great and for some you just want to shoot yourself in the head. The average knowledge of a non tech business user is very very limited when it comes to software and some people even get panic attacks when told ' just download it and run it'. That's the default mode in many businesses. The average person on HN, who can pick up new programming language,read 50 pages of docs in the evening is so much beyond the average office user, that there aren't many hopes of that gap closing any time soon.

[kcplate]

I don’t have any love for MS Office and Teams, but I have experienced literally none of the issues you mentioned other than the two calendars, but that is easily solved by just using one.