Microsoft and Google have a fundamentally different approach to enterprise software than Google. Microsoft is the mediocre Apple of enterprise tech, before Apple even got that reputation.
EVERYTHING IS INTEGRATED. Microsoft makes it so insanely easy to stay within the microsoft ecosystem, that using a mediocre software created by Microsoft is always a better option than a 3rd party tool. (See slacks getting clobbered by teams, despite slacks being significantly faster)
Part of what makes MSFT click is that they they go above and beyond to create a tool everyone can use. Additionally, they are obsessed with customers to a point that their tools lose all personality. This is bad if you want something that is opinionated in exactly the way you want (see Obsidian vs OneNote), but great for companies that want to offer an inoffensive tool that is serviceable for all its employees.
An incumbent is fearsome when it uses every little advantage in its greater product offering to embed itself as the obvious option. (Apple for consumer tech, MSFT for enterprise tech). Google has refused to implement the kind of top down organizational structure needed to enforce such integration in its product lineup. This is the company that couldn't sync its grocery lists with google keep. As long as it stays true, Google will never be able to leverage the advantage of an incumbent. It's a shame too, their products are honestly quite good.
March 31, 2020: 75 million DAU [0]
March 31, 2021: 145 million DAU [1]
0: https://www.fool.com/earnings/call-transcripts/2020/04/30/mi...
1: https://twitter.com/jeffteper/status/1387141320519557120?s=2... (https://twitter.com/bdsams/status/1387146648678244356?s=20)
"Do you already have O365? Yes? Then you already have Teams!"
That's a hard place to sell a competing solution to =)
IT went as far as remotely disabling the use of zoom after months of pleading with people not to use it.
This was ostensibly done for security reasons (citing zoom bombing, of all things, coz it was in the news).
When teams had a raft of really bad zero days, of course, nobody in IT batted an eye.
MS reaaaallly got its hooks in to that place.
It made me wonder how startups are supposed to compete with this type of thing. Zoom was free and better liked and it still got shut down.
I don't think this is without basis? Zoom got some bad press. Unsure if Teams is any better.
Zoom apps sending data to Facebook https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22693792
Zoom lying about e2ee https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25044254
Zoom installer on macOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22706650
Zoom rolling its own crypto https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22768494
I'd reckon Zoom engs know what's e2ee and what's not. I tend to agree with folks who say their sales team purposefully lied to win deals.
I remember the Facebook thing alone getting about as much airtime as MS's three teams zero days despite being insignificant by comparison.
E2E encryption that isn't properly end to end is newsworthy but it isn't a good reason to justify selecting a competing product that doesn't even try.
And that's just sales talk. It says ADFS needs multiple servers, which it doesn't. At least it depends on your deployment model. And whether AD running on another server constitutes "multiple servers" (of course just as true for Okta).
It also says Okta runs in the cloud. The implication is that ADFS doesnt. Well, like anything, it does.
The remainder talks about low TCO, deployment speed, simplifying AD complexity, and the cloud. All of which are rather subjective.
I say all of this having done some very complex ADFS deployments - at the extreme using Chip & PIN authN, and authR from client workstations assumed to be compromised.
So given the above I'd love to find a compelling and unbiased comparison. Including featureset.
[1] https://www.okta.com/resources/whitepaper/why-choose-okta-vs...
This either shows that Slack's "email is dead" marketing strategy was very effective (did an important job during a specific period of early growth and they have now moved on) or very ineffective (their main proposition completely passed you by).
Outlook is not my preferred email client but having. Used it on both windows and Mac OS as groupware tool, it's still better than most things by Google.
It's just snappier, because it's native code. And outlook on Mac OS used to be gorgeous.
Excel is a jewel and a marvel of software engineering. Google sheets is good for doing just 2+2.
And so on. When it comes to office stuff, Microsoft software is just better.
Sadly, because it's all proprietary software, but it is was it it.
Gmail used to be snappier than Outlook is now when it launched, even as a webapp. I'm not sure quite how they've managed to mess it up so badly, but it's poor engineering not a limitation of the tech stack.
Agree with you on the other office products though. Word, Excel, etc aren't perfect, but they're much better than the alternatives for most things.
I've been forced into using Outlook on Windows and Mac and snappy has never been my impression, although I seem to recall it being somewhat more usable on Windows. Not that GMail is snappy either, but a browser based client isn't necessarily slower than Outlook. Although an actually fast native client would be hard to beat.
We just had our first Teams meeting this morning, in fact... we could not figure out how to simply view the person speaking. Seems like it's always in split view, or that goofy "Together" view. Nothing makes you want to turn off the camera more than having your face on everybody's screen through 100% of the meeting.
Teams is not the best messaging/videoconferencing program by a country mile, yet it shows the most growth YoY [citation needed].
I worked for a few companies who dipped a toe into the Microsoft waters and their products drowned everything else out; this was not because the offering was technically superior or cheaper.