Microsoft has also taken some pretty big steps forward over the last couple of years when it comes to document collaboration/sharing. Most Office applications now allow for live sharing/collaboration via the desktop apps.

There’s also the O365 web-based capability similar to Docs/Sheets. Plus, these are integrated with other O365 products like OneDrive and SharePoint (laugh, but SharePoint is unlikely to go away anytime soon with enterprise customers).

I have yet to find a product differentiator that GSuite (or whatever they call it now) has over M365/O365, except maybe sometimes price. On the other hand, Microsoft has a number of differentiators over Google’s products. Even with the price differences, Enterprise customers get significant volume licensing discounts and see cost savings through not having to retrain everyone from IT administrators to day-to-day users.

I forgot to mention previously all the integration with existing system administration capabilities widely in use at companies (e.g., Active Directory, identity management/permissions/sharing permissions, etc.). It is only becoming more ingrained with Azure AD, M365 Enterprise licensing, etc.

I’m sure I am missing something, but I do not understand why a business - other than very small ones - would choose to use GSuite.

But almost all businesses are SMEs, and almost all of those are small businesses.

If you're operating at enterprise scale, and you've got dedicated contacts at Microsoft and negotiating leverage in your commercial terms for using their products and access to the top editions of those products, you're moving in a different world to most smaller businesses. That's true whether we're talking about Office, Windows or almost anything else Microsoft offers these days. For a small organisation, the pricing structure and artificially broken products and lock-in effects and so on are significant downsides to going with Microsoft.

On the other hand, if you are part of a large organisation, being able to create and collaborate on a single document or spreadsheet in isolation is still the foundation of everything, but being able to manage large numbers of those documents and spreadsheets and access to them by large numbers of people for large numbers of reasons is also an important requirement. I have yet to encounter an online competitor that really has powerful tools for things like formal revision management, organising the full set of information for large projects, and constructing large, complicated documents with many contributors who have different responsibilities. There's a whole ecosystem around MS Office that deals with these kinds of issues, but a smaller organisation would probably have little need of it.

I agree with you that some of the functionality in O365 (or M365 for that matter) is unnecessary for many small businesses. However, for the features that are most likely to be necessary, the costs and terms are not all that unreasonable and Microsoft does do their Business level plans without an annual contract.

Further, the costs between GSuite and O365 are comparable, while features are disproportionately in Microsoft's favor. Whether those features are needed or not, is a legitimate question to ask though.

Can you be a little more specific about the artificially broken products and lock-in effects are you referring to? I have not experienced those types of issues with any of the O365 tenants I set-up and currently manage.

For artificially broken, I was more thinking of products like Windows 10, where anything below Enterprise/Education is IMNSHO unsuitable for professional use for well-documented reasons around forced updates and reboots, mandatory phoning home, etc. However, to get the best of Office, you typically also need to be on Windows, as other platforms are either unsupported or very much second tier.

For lock-in effects, I'm partly talking about the commercial terms for accessing the serious products particularly for smaller businesses, partly about tactics like the various poorly documented and sometimes changing file formats Microsoft has relied on over the years to try to force upgrades, and partly about the push to use ever more of Microsoft's online services. Microsoft relies heavily on trying to get you onto its platforms, and particularly these days the establishing subscription-y enterprise-y relationships even if you're a small business that never needed that kind of relationship with MS before, and then using various technical barriers to make it hard to get off the ride.

Its main advantage is that it presents an extremely good history of who said what when, and what parts of the document were updated. It also has a cross-document “inbox” of relevant updates.

The main disadvantage is that we can’t use it with collaborators outside the company. I’m not sure if that’s specific to our company or a product limitation.

I’ve worked at SAP, Oracle, and a few large consultancies. Most of my customers are in the enterprise size range. Office is used heavily by the larger companies of the world and therefore is used by their software and service vendors. The only company I’ve ever worked with that was totally google drive was an American startup. Office is still very much the dominant suite of software across most companies although there are plenty of smaller American companies trying to work without it. I personally can’t tolerate the the lack of basic formatting that docs offers are how limited sheets and slides are. Just adding section numbers in docs needs an add on and if your collaborators don’t have the same add on they just add new sections without numbering. I can’t imagine large documents without numbering...