I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.
Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do.
Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).
You're right about the feature set. But, Google's products are good enough for most users. The justification for all the bloat in MS Office was always "people only use 20% of the features but each person's 20% is different." Well Google actually did a pretty good job of identifying the features that most people use. I hardly ever open up MS Office anymore (it isn't even installed on my main work computer).
- Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application
- Sharepoint online for a CRM
- OneNote online for a shared scratchpad.
The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the last year.
I agree with your critique. This is just a hunch but I don't think they are ahead:
- Outlook.com must be one of the worst web apps there is. Compared to Gmail it's just plain awful.
- Sharepoint is decidedly one of the worst pieces of software ever built, that is if you are a developer. If you are an editor/content manager then it is possible it's just fine.
I use Outlook.com as my main email provider. And I'm managing to convince people to move off've Gmail onto it because of it's streamlined interface. What do you find wrong in it?
It might just be a matter of preference but to me Outlook.com is an attempt to webify Outlook The Desktop Client, which was horrible to start with. But they made it worse than the desktop app.
An example: while searching in your Outlook.com "client" it enters a new state, the search state. When you are done searching there is a left arrow in the navigation panel which you can click to go back to the "normal" state of things. Awkward.
I'm a longtime Windows user, familiar with Microsoft user interfaces, but to me there is nothing to love about Outlook.com.
That’s interesting, especially as that’s not what the link you’ve kindly referenced says. Congratulations on being able to change the user agent - Microsoft is not you and has to support decisions it makes. I can see why there’d be little cause for them to perform Linux testing given the small market share. So, if you were Microsoft - and not you - would you rather potentially break the experience for Linux users, or not enable what appears to be OS/browser specific code that speeds up the experience? Again, calling this a deliberate slowdown is extremely misleading.
The Outlook.com app that just rolled out of Beta (and seems much more closely related to the work the ex-Accompli team has been doing with Windows Mail app that is also the iOS/Android Outlook apps) is rather good. It's probably still a few months until it rolls out to most Office 365 tenants, though.
Microsoft's problem with O365 is that they don't want to re-invent anything. Google has the opposite problem in that they re-invent chat a few times a year.
If you look at Teams or Outlook groups, they're just recycling features that exist already. The Office apps are getting better in the sense that they are getting closer to feature parity between the various versions of office -- but they are doing so in a way that will break enterprise IT.
office 365 is far inferior to google docs for online collaborative document editing. You can lock the doc in office, you get into situations where it's very hard to safely have people collaborate on docs.
I don't find this to be true. For the last 2 years I have been using G-Suite and recently went back to O365. I find the collaboration features in the new version to be on par with googles. Also the UI is better, the online feature set is better, especially for PowerPoint and Word. As for Excel the desktop version is still the undisputed champion but it syncs up very quickly with others who are editing the same document on their desktop with excel.
My experience has differed from yours. I've recently started using O365 for some client work. I'm really missing a few features from GSuite, that are important for collaboration:
1. Ability to reference a specific person in a comment (e.g. +DamnYuppie please add your thing here).
2. Ability to add/update TOC for a document
3. Comments being owned by whoever wrote them, so others cannot accidentally edit the text of the comment.
4. Ability to notified of and reply to comments by email.
5. Ability to organise documents within my own folder, without creating second copies. (In GSuite, a document is a single thing, even if different people want to organise their own folders differently.)
I also find the UI is hard to get used to. It's different from GSuite, which is to be expected, but it's also different from the desktop version of Word.
Of course I went through a phase of finding that GSuite lacked features that I liked in Excel, but the ease with which you can use Google Docs/Sheets/Slides across devices, and the super-slick display and interaction of the commenting and suggesting features, more than make up for those.
6 months ago at my last company they used office and we used office 365 to collaboratively edit some word docs and we had a problem where the docs kept getting locked and others couldn't edit them. this doesn't happen with google docs. if you have a big collaborative doc its a problem, or was 6 months ago. Did it get fixed?
I have used O365 to collaborate on a spreadsheet and the experience was horrible. We had about 500 rows and 8 columns and it would lock up or just crash on us. We were not even collaborating. We just shared the file with 8 people and were trying to copy data from one tab to other (within the sheet).
Google Sheets was a much better experience for collaboration.
My home computers are all linux and GSuite is perfect for almost everything I do. I could see the issue with excel for many people in accounting/finance/etc, but sheets is more than enough for things I do as I don't do anything complex in a spreadsheet.
At work I am forced to use windows and have to use Office for many tasks (including SharePoint - talk about a terrible product) and aren't allowed to use GSuite. If I had a choice, I would make the same decision as Airbus
I haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.
For most uses, Docs and Sheets "work". It is extremely easy to create a basic collaborative table or document. So long as you aren't stressing the sync features, everyone is on the same page.
Where G-Suite suffers is in the random features that a small segment of power users swear by. The keyboard shortcuts aren't the same as what people learned in Word/Excel. There are many incompatibilities and rendering issues with the Excel and Word formats. But these concerns apply mostly to advanced users; for basic documents, letters, lists, and tables, G-Suite in 2018 works well
To add to this, WordML is super powerful. Modern .docx files are basically just big zip files. You can easily edit this and do some crazy things and MS Word will be pretty good about reflecting this in the editor. G-Docs can have some issues with modified WordML.
You can do some of these things in open formats like .odt and G-Docs will be better about this. However, there are still problems with things like pagination.
So overall, I think Docs is where you want to be unless you have some super niche use case. I don't have enough experience trying to do crazy things with Sheets to have an opinion on it vs Excel though.
For anything other than Excel, I actually vastly prefer Google stuff. Collaboration features and not having to worry about files outweigh the (small) downsides for me by quite a margin. Sheets is a bit of a laggard, but it’ll get there in another couple of years.
I think it might have been a Joel on Software story that talked about how when they did a review of what people actually used Excel for they found that a ridiculous number never went beyond "making lists of things".
By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use.
I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1].
Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc.
As I recall the study went a little farther. The majority just used it for making lists. The rest used 10% of the features, but it was a different 10% for each person.
>That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.
I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets.
Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.
It is true that Sheets isn't as powerful as Excel. But it's a good substitute for 99% of users. And for people dealing with complex models/large amount of data, they should probably use a proper programming language (Python, R) and version control.
Google Sheet's limit of 400k cells sounds like a lot, that could be as few as 40k rows with 10 columns (probably lot of them would be dimensional). As someone who works with large amounts of data and business users, it sounds nice to say everyone should learn to code and query, but in practice the business users can get a lot done with a big spreadsheet with fewer errors and less training. I frequently hold classes to teach SQL, and even that is pretty tough for a lot of people to learn and do correctly.
Seems like preview builds only at the moment. Reading the docs it also seems a lot more involved than the Google Docs workflow of Tools > Script Editor > write code.
Keep in mind Microsoft had to some extent nerfed the non-Windows version of Excel, Word, & Powerpoint.
The hope was to keep people on Windows, but as people started to shift away from Windows, it makes it much easier for them to jump from the sub-par version of MS Office to other products.
I think a lot of the more complex stuff excel has historically been used for has appropriately migrated to better suited analytics and data analysis platforms.
I think G-Suite found the sweet spot on what most users need from office productivity tools and enhanced it by doubling-down on collaboration.
Regarding advanced usage, I just completed a G-Suite project that leveraged some of the advanced features of Google Sheets and was quite impressed. If you haven't done so already, test out the IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML, IMPORTRANGE, FILTER and QUERY (with group by and pivot) functions. You can build some very nice dashboards, pulling data from multiple sources (web, worksheets) and summarizing into one view. I'll admit that the syntax was peculiar at first, but once you get used to it, it's very powerful--even without App Script. As a web developer, IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML is actually pretty fun.
No Microsoft fanboy, quite the contrary. But ended up installing Office 365 for my SOs business (~ 30 people) last year. And I'm properly impressed, by the amount of progress they do. It is a solid offering for very little money.
Yes something like Teams (Slack Clone) might be feel a bit betaish. But they are starting to add features such as recording of meeting, automatic transcribing and inline message translation.
I really think they are going to be hard to beat in the future.
Airbus became a big user of Google cloud some time ago. Airbus made a presentation on last Google Cloud Next how they migrated core technology systems for satellite imagery storage and analytics to Google Cloud.
Google Apps are a logical extension, as you can use same accounts for Google Cloud and email. There are some benefits of the integration - e.g. export BigQuery result as Google Sheets. They also had a CTO poached from Google.
Curious if Airbus moving over to GSuite has anything to do with Google Hangouts Chat launching and being included in GSuite as the final piece of the puzzle. Google didn't have an answer to Microsoft Teams, but now it does.
Do you imagine a CEO switching a whole company of this size because google released a new chat app? AFAIK those decisions are planned for a long time & costs are calculated + lost/gained productivity. What a terrible CEO would that be if they switched 130k people on a whim.
I can certainly imagine Airbus having a list of requirements that Google would have to satisfy as part of the contract to switch to GSuite, and it would seem reasonable that group chat might be on that list.
Not too familiar with MS Teams, but I was pretty excited when Hangouts Chat rolled out a few weeks ago. I figured if we were already paying for GSuite, why not use Hangouts Chat to replace slack? I ended up being terribly disappointed. Hangouts Chat feels more like a message board than it does a chat app. Google needs to put a ton more work into it if they plan on getting people to convert from Slack.
If the result is that we have moved from MS straight into the arms of Google we have won nothing. I wish LibreOffice would get more dev investment from big companies. As of now they are unfortunately way behind MS Office in terms of usability and design.
Hangouts didn't work for a long time on Firefox. They fixed it around a month ago or so, but that's pretty much three years after they knew that this problem would arise (deprecation of NPAPI plugins in Firefox).
For other parts, for example GMail, I've heard that they don't work as well on Firefox.
And to some degree, this is also just what I expect to see more of in the future, as outside of G Suite they're not exactly known for treating other browsers well either. Android Firefox in particular gets bullied by Google a lot. Last time I checked, the Google Custom Search that webpages can embed, just straight up returned a 404 when contacted by a browser with Android Firefox user-agent. And they serve some age-old version of google.com to it.
I was coming here to say this. Nothing compares to Excel. The problem with replacing Excel is that it has thousands of features, and every user seems to use a different subset of those features.
With that said, a large majority of users can probably get by with what GSuite offers.
Long have I wished for an open source spreadsheet tool built on a database backend.
I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model.
I thought for sure when Oracle bought Sun that this would be forthcoming but nothing came of it.
That was exactly my experience around two years ago. The brand of the company was far, far more valuable than their internal processes or capabilities as a result, and it was a painful migration (still is, from what I hear).
It's hard to describe why Excel is so good at what it does. The only way I can think to describe it is "the most amount of power for the least amount of work."
I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise.
I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.
They are big enough for their contracts to enforce usage of something other than the de facto standard.
Not only are they big but a lot of their suppliers are SMEs which in effect are economically dependent to Airbus (even if they carefully avoid dependence to them in the legal definition of the expression).
Do you have any performance benchmarking to show the difference between Excel and LibreOffice Calc, because my experience LibreOffice is much better on resources. I would like to see what tests you are using so that I can run them myself.
> I am wondering which Microsoft PR company you work for?
That’s really unnecessary.
I don’t have any of the alternatives available to me right now but if you’re honestly curious I could take another look this weekend and see if every widely used function has a shortcut. But from what I remember many don’t. I would love to see a plugin that maps excel shortcuts to either libre office or open office
First of all Google slides are even less free software related than Powerpoint (can't use them offline etc) but more importantly I said "layout" specifically. Aligning stuff nicely just works very well in Powerpoint.
I started following this religiously for recurring decks, and the results have been outstanding.
If you want to hone your communication skills in general:
* Do not add animations
* Do not use themes
* Force every bullet point to fit on a single line
* Points need not be grammatically complete
* Use a font size that you can read from more than nine feet away
* Talk about - don't read from - the slide
And now, some unconventional advice:
PowerPoint can absolutely replace Vizio, and you should disregard all the rules when you create product announcement decks where style can trump substance. Some of those slides have over a hundred animations and must be split up into three or more pseudo-slides (initial state, N keyframe slides, final state) seamlessly.
PowerPoint is an extremely versatile tool, and its success and failure modes directly mirror the user's.
Almost every single company I've ever seen for 20+ years has open sourced their developer SDK examples. It literally makes no sense what so ever to do anything else.
This has nothing to do with what the OP was talking about which is open sourcing the core app.
The comment was about trending G Suite into open source.
You've got to start somewhere. It starts with developer samples, moves into tools, languages (Apps Script), then sub-products.
If you're asking for Google to open source it's products in one big blow, I don't think that will happen without smaller steps. I'm on the team that would probably best start the conversation of considering G Suite in open source. Would love to hear proposals.
I'd be truly excited if Google was prepared to state it had any intention to open source it's actual web apps. But everything I know about the company says that isn't even an option. What you open source is the same as most of the other things Google open sources: The things that funnel you into Google's proprietary services.
Even suggesting that Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides might be open source someday is as unbelievable as suggesting Google's considering open sourcing their search algorithm. But I'd love to be proven wrong.
You are reflecting very poorly on your employer because you are proving that they hired someone naive enough to think that he could try to open source G Suite.
FWIW, those numbers are based on "the number of unique contributors (users who pushed code, opened or commented on an issue or PR)" to a project in those orgs. So not really a measure of those companies' contributions to open source (it counts any action from any user, not just someone from those orgs), but companies also have more than one org (you can see the problem with all the articles covering this from the fact that both angular and google are in the top ten list...).
You're proving the grandparent's point. Android's "openness" matters only if you want to build your own OS based on Android or you're a system integrator. For users buying Android devices, it's more often than not just as closed platform as any other alternative.
- A way for users to prohibit internet access per application
- no forced installation of the whole Google Play Services, just to get access to the Play Store
- better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
- less politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
> - better root management, so that manufacturers can ship access to root to all users
Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?
> ess politics in the Play Store. Google has for example thrown out 3rd party YouTube apps that offered background playback, because those supposedly violated YouTube ToS with that, shortly before introducing a paid option for background playback in their own YouTube app.
So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google. How is this politics?
> Are you sure it is Android problem and not manufacturers decision, because they are afraid to be flooded with warranty issues from broken rooted phones?
I'm dead certain that some manufacturers would still not ship root, but I'm also dead certain that more would do than do right now, if it was officially supported.
> So, these apps are illegal from law standpoint, and make damage to Google.
They're not illegal. It was never trialled whether they're illegal. Google did not sue these app developers and did not have a judge confirm that they actually violate the YouTube ToS. They just threw them out of the Play Store, with the accusation pretty much just for PR reasons.
And I'm sure that they would not have won an actual lawsuit. The point in the YouTube ToS that they accused with, basically said that you're not allowed to separate the audio from the visuals of a YouTube video. Supposedly this was in there, to have something against people pirating music through YouTube.
If this were to suddenly be interpreted as it not being legal to have any way of just listening to YouTube videos without seeing it, then tabbed browsers would be illegal, any sort of multi-tasking-capable operating system would be illegal, it could technically even be illegal for users to not adamantly stare at their screen as soon as they click on a YouTube video.
No judge would push this through and no judge would rule someone guilty for not knowing that all these seemingly accepted uses were apparently different to offering background playback in an Android app.
That Google seems to not think much of their own rules would not have helped the case either.
Android, as is offered to most of the customers, is basically a completely closed platform that just happens to allow you to side-load APKs. It's basically Windows.
For starters - have you tried to use Android without Google Play Services or its reverse engineered open reimplementation, microG? Android with F-Droid is like a completely different runtime platform than Android with Google Play. It might be a nice platform, but it's different - you can't just switch without extreme changes to your habits and apps you use, even if you don't mind installing closed apps. If you say "Android is open", you really mean something completely different than most of Android users think about when hearing "Android". When they hear or say "Android", they think "Google Play's Android".
Most of Microsoft contributions to open source are "how to make X work on windows or Azure" kind of projects such as linuxkit, node etc. There are a few exceptions though and it's getting better (yay) with really cool projects such as VS code and now many more.
Did you know that GitHub doesn't equal the definer of open source, in fact in many ways they are the opposite, and that GitLab and many other projects operate outside the confinements of a commercial solution?
Let me know when they open source their spyware OS and then we'll talk. Until then you are just continuing to campaign for exploiting educational tools by locking them down so that students can't understand why they are getting forced upgrades, always getting viruses, and having their shopping and browsing information sent to Microsoft Moscow or Mossad.
I feel sorry for whomever has to administrate that. From an admin perspective, GSuite doesn't hold a candle to Exchange. What do you mean I can't forward a users email, set an OOO reply, or give full access without logging in as the user!?
Maybe the main reason is email hosting, with gmail being so ubiquitous? Second reason could be better integration with mobile platforms. Other than that, one could think that GSuite is cheaper, but it's really roughly the same.
It seems strange to use the present tense ("moves to GSuite", "ditches Microsoft") for a change that should take (at least) 5 to 10 years to implement.
Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an office suite makes sense.
There is 'should' and there is 'does' :-) When IBM acquired Blekko they were moving people over to the web based version of Lotus notes at 1,000 employees a month (give or take) and with 450K employees that was a 30+ year timeline (it got faster as they worked out transition kinks but still) the point is that at certain scales these things are a lot more difficult for enterprises than you might expect.
The biggest challenge (as I saw it) was making sure that everyone could email everyone else all through the transition because if email stops, the company stops in that portion.
All of that to say that even though Airbus is one less than a third that many employees (133K vs 450k) its organization complexity is up there. And keeping complex organizations functional and efficient as possible during a large transition is often addressed by keeping the rate of change manageable (aka slower than you would expect).
People need to be trained, documents moved and converted, business processes adapted, ... In addition, solutions will have to be found for documents that exceed GSuite’s capabilities. 10 years? No, but 2-3 years for sure.
> “We expect it to take up to 18 months to reach every one of our 130,000 employees but our teams are already starting to work on a plan which will involve you and of course our social partners,” said Enders.
By the time announcements like this are made, there have already been lengthy successful IT pilots with much change management planning already conducted, partners engaged, etc. If they say 12-18mo, they may slip to 18-24mo, but definitely not multiple years.
That said, the other commenter is also accurate: a "full" roll-out will not mean 100% replacement. Things would break and it would be an irresponsible management decision to force some things that shouldn't be forced.
Source: I led a large MSO-->G Suite migration in a previous role.
I think the other commentators are really understating the extent to which Google beats Microsoft on realtime collaboration. In Office 365 you can see that someone else has opened the file but you can't see their changes until they Save which is hilariously retro. Google Docs doesn't even have a Save button. In Office if someone else makes a change and saves it you get a popup to merge their changes, or if you save you get a popup to merge your changes with their saves. That's garbage. In Google Docs you and I can edit the same _word_ or even the same character at the same time, with all changes reflected on both sides immediately. No saving, no syncing.
How much of a role did licensing fees play and how much of a role the desire of management to “be modern”? An Office suite is the perfect example of a software that benefits greatly from the speed, usability, OS integration of a native application. Collaboration can easily be achieved with Box, SharePoint, etc. I’m sure there will be employee backlash
Naïve question here: how is Google able to have Docs and Sheets without getting the crap sued out of them by Microsoft? In a similar way as the OpenOffice and similar reverse engineering efforts avoided getting attacked?
Sued for... what exactly? Not only do Docs and Sheets have almost nothing in common with Office besides being... well, an office suite of some sort... Microsoft's DOCX and XLSX formats were offered up as a standard other developers can implement, so compatibility isn't a problem either.
At a past consulting job the CEO claimed Google was reading his confidential information in the 00’s and refuses to use anything except Office 365. In his case confidence that MS will not act improperly is the most important feature.
As an engineer working on Docs and related products from inception through 2010: I would be astonished if this were the case. Had such behavior become known within the engineering team, there would likely have been an uprising. There was no backdoor mechanism for looking documents, at least on the Docs (word processing) side, and in any case this sort of thing Was Not Done. My guess is that things are locked down even more tightly now.
Interesting. You would think the case of Alex Kibkalo would lead to the opposite conclusion. Microsoft prosecuted a blogger for piracy of Windows software after reading his private hotmail emails.
I was with you until the last sentence. Rust is not some magical "get out of bugs free" card. Bad programmers can write bad code in any language, and good programmers can write good code in any language.
We need to take security more seriously for our national security, I agree. More security-minded programming languages and frameworks may help with that. But rewriting them in Rust won't magically make their problems go away.
Memory related bugs (buffer overruns etc.) are the reason for most security bugs. Rust avoids these entire class of bugs. Yes, bad programmers can write bad code in any language, but you'd have to be really bad to cause memory related bugs in Rust.
Because Rust doesn't have the "unsafe" keyword, and no one would ever trade security for performance. Just like no one would ever misuse global variables just to make development easier. Just like no one would ever commit their signing keys into a public repo, just like no one would ever allow SQL to be run from user input, just like no one would ever you get the idea.
The culture that led to Adobe or Microsoft products being the way they are/were is not dependent on the language they used. Gates' security memo in 2002 never once blamed the languages they developed in, it blamed the culture their products grew up in. And funny enough, they've gotten much more secure without ever switching programming languages.
Again, I'm not anti-Rust. But buying a car with airbags doesn't mean you're never going to crash it, and it certainly doesn't mean you can never die in a crash.
Except for the fact that there is nothing stopping developers from using `unsafe`* to do bad things. And considering they have the tool, they will use it. In addition, it is unlikely that any significantly large system would be realistic to write in 100% Rust. There will be plenty unsafe dependencies that are unavoidable.
You're actually not far off. They are the biggest threats. Have you ever noticed that all of Microsoft releases gets leaked by Russian groups like WZor? Russia has long been releasing betas and alphas of Windows before anyone else, and no one has questioned how or why?
Zoho CEO here. Please take a look at our Workplace suite (Mail, Cliq, Connect, Docs & Office suite - collaboration and productivity) and judge it for yourself. Our Writer (word processor) and Show (presentation) have had major upgrades recently, and Sheet is getting upgraded too.
Google's AI-based features are applied to G Suite as well as the public versions, AFAIK. So your emails still get swept up into their deep learning algorithm for generating Smart Replies and the like.
A lot of Google's smart features technically "read your emails", and they are used on your account whether it's paid or not.
It remains a fair stretch beyond my comprehension how anyone - individual or 100.000+ workforce corporation - could wish to lay their fate and data utterly in the hands of some third party entity.
Either you've never actually built anything worthwhile or your sentiment approaches the people who say "I never trust anyone" without thinking about what that statement actually means.
Car companies lay their fate of their passengers in third party tire companies and third party brake companies.
Airplane companies lay their product's fate in the hands of third party engines.
Airplane passengers lay their fate utterly in the hands of some third party pilot.
Car drivers lay their fate in car companies and other drivers.
Spreadsheets? Data? Whatever works best right now will do 99.9% of the time.
Yes, clearly every social interaction is based on some level of trust. Your examples sort of state the obvious.
The point is, I will not drive on shitty tires if I have a reasonable option of good ones. I will not knowingly fly with a drunk pilot if a sober one is available.
Airbus - and nearly everyone I know - happily hand over ultimate control of their data trove to someone else, seemingly without any pressing grounds for doing so.
And yes, I know that is the way of the world these days, however much I may bemoan it. Witness the snide and micro-agression even here on HN whenever someone dares to differ.
I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.
IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.