This is how I see it. People arent thrilled that they aren't as feature rich in other products (cal/mail) but I see it as trying to compete with the whole of Gsuite. And hopefully the more niche features that a hyper technical hackernews reader might want will come then.

Is Zoho another decent alternative? I hear a good amount of praise for it here, but don't know which product(s) people are referring to and what they're good at.

I used Zoho when I was younger and trying out new technologies was still fun. Their mail, docs, CRM, contacts programs were all pretty good, and honestly technologically pretty impressive as far as user-friendly SaaSes go. It's too bad they never got popular in the West (it's an Indian company).

In everyday life as an adult, they just don't have the mindshare that the big clouds have. I default to Google Workspace for everything (or whatever it's called now) because that's what everyone else in my social circle use and what most employers use, and being able to seamlessly share stuff with other Google users is much lower friction than trying to get them to sign up (much less pay for) yet another similar service. The network effect is more important than any minor difference in technical merit...

Yea, I tried going all in on Proton with my consulting work.

A client who was using Google scheduled a meeting that I was invited too and I put it on my calendar. Then somebody had to move the meeting but didn’t click the option to send an update when they did.

Everyone’s Google calendars updated. My Proton didn’t because they didn’t send the update. Everybody else was on time and I wasn’t, making a terrible impression.

In investigating, I found that my Google calendar that had been setup prior to the Proton move also had the update even though it wasn’t on their domain.

That is the network effect in action.

Yeah, calendar invites are a big one. But also the ease of being able to manage sharing via Drive (and be automatically alerted when a Google account owner can't access it), co-edit in Docs (and tagging in comments there), being able to use it as SSO in many places, and having all of that synced to your browser and managed by your Workspace admin. It's the ecosystem that's extremely valuable, not necessarily any individual app.

Wonder why you don't use Google Docs if they do the job ?

Apple Pages as well. It has a web-based cloud version, and it's free. I haven't used it enough to speak on the quality, though.

IME Apple's web apps are piles of pain and garbage.

Zoho?

Google Docs isn't even good, though? Give me MS Office or even LibreOffice running on the desktop any day of the week. I hate when I work at a place that makes use of Google's shitty imitation.

What does Word do better? I feel the opposite, I hate when I have to use Office products. GDocs for my uses has at least feature parity, and collaboration and sharing feels much cleaner.