> It has way more features than google docs and is standard everywhere
I work for another FAANG and we don’t use MS Word. It certainly isn’t “standard” for us. It’s not standard for two of the three FAANG companies, so “everywhere” is inaccurate. Being popular isn’t the same thing as standard. Pages is a far more usable for the vast majority of use cases. Most people aren’t creating extremely complicated word processing documents in their day-to-day. Word is a bloated mess. Keynote is far easier and more elegant than PowerPoint. Excel however certainly shines for big spreadsheet work, but for most spreadsheet work Numbers and the google spreadsheet are perfectly fine.
This isn't about the merits of excel over sheets, it's about employees coming on the board and lying to promote their company. Google makes 1.61 million in revenue per employee. Honestly it's only going to get worse, because if you see the videos of the company meetings, Sundar was always the super loyalist that would say anything to protect Google or run interference for senior leadership. And now that he's CEO they will start aping him.
I may work for Google but I am often critical of them. I have no reason to lie in this instance, and anyone you talk to who works for Google will corroborate what I'm saying. Not everything is a conspiracy.
Your reasoning is based on the belief that Google is sacrificing productivity by not giving all employees office. GP is directly contradicting that line of thought, which makes the rest of it fall apart.
there is two narratives, which do you think is more likely:
1. Google is dogfooding it's own products to improve them and make them competitive and stop potential data/privacy/security leaks by using external software.
2. Google is trying to save 20 bucks
There is nothing wrong with Google docs or sheets and I have used them both. But sooner or later you make enough documents or work with enough spreadsheets you're going to want or need some feature that office has.
Why should it be an either/or thing? Both are valid reasons for Google to prefer its employees use Docs. However the fact that you can choose to use MS Office without any special permissions somewhat undermines your reasoning in point 1.
Google may be a rich company but it's also a very frugal company in many ways, particularly wrt technology (they pioneered the "huge amounts of redundant cheap hardware" approach to DC construction, for example). When Googlers were being coaxed into switching to Docs from MS Office, the financial benefits were front and centre to that pitch.
I work for another FAANG and we don’t use MS Word. It certainly isn’t “standard” for us. It’s not standard for two of the three FAANG companies, so “everywhere” is inaccurate. Being popular isn’t the same thing as standard. Pages is a far more usable for the vast majority of use cases. Most people aren’t creating extremely complicated word processing documents in their day-to-day. Word is a bloated mess. Keynote is far easier and more elegant than PowerPoint. Excel however certainly shines for big spreadsheet work, but for most spreadsheet work Numbers and the google spreadsheet are perfectly fine.