[jaimie]

Strange to say Apple doesn't have productivity tools when Pages, Sheets, and Keynote exist on every Mac. I get the scale arguments, but Handoff and iCloud integration are a sleeper IF you've bought into the ecosystem...

Also hard to overstate just how much more valuable the enterprise market is over the consumer market when comparing Microsoft vs. Google as one-stop anything shops.

I don't see Google as having the obvious dominant position to make the argument it's their race to lose, considering Microsoft has a stake in chatGPT and is actively integrating it into their browser and productivity suites.

[Terretta]

There's a Google bubble on HN, as demonstrated by small-to-medium business facing SaaS launching here offering login with Google and not offering login with Microsoft.

I've talked to many of HN's Google Docs jockey founders that genuinely didn't realize 85% of the US domestic business market is in M365. And they further don't realize that "Continue with Microsoft" is dirt simple and lets companies offer company-managed logins to your SaaS without all the AD/SCIM/SAML nonsense.

"But everyone has Gmail." Well, no, that's not how companies work. And if you think everyone's in Google, that's fine, your login page should look like one of these:

https://www.xsplit.com/user/auth

https://id.atlassian.com/login

You don't even need the "continue with SSO" if you do the Atlassian practice of letting a firm "claim" the domain part of an email and using that to redirect to an SSO flow. And to start, skip SSO, and just use the "Continue with" Oauth2.

[zooq_ai]

Unfortunately, You are in a US bubble.

Globally, Google brand is 10x stronger than Microsoft for Small Businesses

[rcbdev]

Absolutely untrue - Every company and university I've ever worked with or for in Europe used Microsoft 365. Not a single exception.

[zooq_ai]

US + Europe is not the world

[zinekeller]

I love this "X in not the world comment" while others are giving more and more evidence of the opposite. Care to give actual evidence, like, I don't know, this Statisa survey (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/productivity-s...) because you've now looked farcical. Even looking at African results (which is a relative greenfield), it seems that Microsoft has a sight lead here (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/productivity-s...).

Edit: Indonesia is the largest market which has Google beat Microsoft (https://www.statista.com/outlook/tmo/software/productivity-s...). India (due to Zoho) and China (due to... locally-specific software like Kingsoft (aka WPS) et al.) took a large chunk but on Microsoft-Google tussle MS still beats Google (especially in China where Google doesn't really operate).

[maeil]

East-Asia chiming in here, Microsoft dominates enterprise, Google is a tiny player, single digit percentage market share for any enterprise product. Only on cloud does MS have competition from AWS and local players, everything else is Microsoft. And even in cloud Azure is rapidly eating through AWS marketshare.

[fakedang]

Microsoft or pirated Microsoft? I was surprised when <insert major Arab oil company> was using pirated MS Office on all their systems. This was a bit more than ten years ago though, so 365 wasn't a thing. But still....

[sagman]

In my country we used pirated version of Office products. Does that count?

[sirspacey]

I have the most respect for this country

[rmbyrro]

In South America, Microsoft brand is waaaaay stronger than Google's for businesses of all sizes. Google is viewed more as a consumer brand.

[Terretta]

> bubble

It's not a bubble when one specifically names the Venn diagram circle "85% of the US domestic business market". It's naming a market.

> brand is stronger

Presumably the founders' interest is wallet share, not market share.

Are you saying Atlassian is in a US bubble?

[imp0cat]

But is it really? It seems to me that almost every business is using the Exchange/Outlook combo, not Google products.

[MrDresden]

Icelander here, so all our companies are small. I'd say 85-90% of the market (50+ employees) use M$.

[CuriouslyC]

Google's competitive advantage is threefold:

1. Real estate - Youtube, Gmail, Maps, Search (for now), etc. 2. Compute - probably still the best in the industry, but with recent Microsoft/meta compute buys it's hard to say for sure. 3. Talent - probably also still the top of the industry. Geoff Hinton and Zoubin Gharamani setting direction and Jeff Dean building it is hard to beat, and the ranks are deep. Yann LeCunn is also brilliant and Andrej Karpathy while less seasoned is one of the top researchers in the field, but overall there's still a bit of a spread from Google's roster, at least when it comes to AI researchers.

If Sundar and the other top brass weren't MBA-bots with no vision, and the famous Google bureaucracy had been reigned in gradually over the last 5 years while promoting a builder-centric culture, this would be in the bag for Google no question. Instead, Satya Nadella played 3D chess while Sundar was looking at a checkers board.

[falcor84]

Geoff Hinton quit Google last year, no? But other than that, I guess I agree.

[sjwhevvvvvsj]

I think Google lost the top researchers when they destroyed the culture. All the competitor companies are mainly led by ex-Google talent, and honestly who in their right mind would take a Google job today over OpenAI, Mistral, or even Meta (where you will be releasing models like Llama for the world to use).

Google killed the culture and is bleeding top talent. They have reduced themselves to digital landlord and sure they can extract rent, but that’s not what attracts people.

[whimsicalism]

that is the media narrative but not at all what happened.

Google's 'don't be evil' grad-school-style culture had fallen apart by the late 2010's because there are tons of people who will just rest and vest.

So strong ML researchers basically were creating massive value but much of it was going to rest&vest salaries. OAI basically came along and said - hey, we don't have rest & vesters, do you want to make $1m+/yr? And most of the top google researchers said yes.

[sjwhevvvvvsj]

It’s not just media narrative. The culture was eroding for years, as you note, but the dam finally broke and they went full IBM/Kodak. Or in other words, “slowly at first, then all at once”.

[whimsicalism]

Most of the recent media coverage has been resting&vesting employee backlash against the fact that Google is making them do work again. This is a cultural shift, but not away from the culture that made Google great - the original culture was grad-school, not rest and vest, and that died years ago.

[camgunz]

Haven't one or two long-time Googlers left or gotten laid off and then written strong criticisms of Google? They don't sound like rest & vest (also should say I don't super agree w/ this term) to me, they sound like people who loved Google, were there a long time, and watched the culture decay.

[whimsicalism]

I’m not super invested in the term “rest&vest” so it is whatever.

But touché - many of the critiques are being written by super talented and impactful people. But I do not think those critiques are necessarily incompatible with what I am saying.

There is a very real and very frustrating (if you work there and want to be impactful) phenomenon in these tech companies of people resting on their laurels.

[myle]

Even if we assume that all of Google is based on ML algorithms (not true, given problems like serving, front end, data collection, ...), ML itself is 90% SWE work.

[whimsicalism]

I don't understand how your comment interacts with mine, but to be clear I was not saying that everyone who isnt in ML is not working or contributing value or anything like that.

[richardw]

Apple is coming. I think the personal agent is where we really want the smarts and if they’re not trying to own that space the CEO should be fired.