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Lots of shiny new tools to close more sales in the war against g suite.

Yet I'll have to wait several more years for a fix for the bug in Office web mail client that incorrectly says there is new mail on the browser tab, when in fact there is no new mail.

Employee tracking features or not, MS 365 is orders of magnitude worse than g-suite in every regard.

Employees don't want these products, so they have to go after managers who can crow to their managers about monitoring productivity.




I respectfully disagreed. I felt MS365 is superior than GSuite. Google Drive have reoccurring issues that drove my boss and me crazy and apparently it is a common issue. Outlook have features that I want to use that Gmail don't have.

My boss is considering to moving to MS365 because GSuite showing its ugly head often and that have a impact on our productivity.


> I felt MS365 is superior than GSuite.

Wow, talk about a low bar!

Less snarkily: G suite works for low complexity tasks (let's not get int G drive which seems designed to add gratuitous complexity). Channeling Clayton Christiansen, it's a "minimill" that does a tiny part of the job, not well but adequately.

And it could be argued that most people don't need the capabilities of MS Office. Certainly no one person needs most of the features. There are definitely small problems for which less is more.

Much as I hate using MS365 (back-compatible nightmare of poor UX decisions, too many features for my particular use case) my heart, and productivity, sinks when I have to use the gsuite tools.

It's interesting that nobody has managed to really upend this market, not for lack of trying. There must be huge institutional inertia.


I will concede Google Drive is garbage. But even in that garbage product there aren't as many glaring bugs that have been around forever.

The worst example: you can't use the browser's back button in the MS 365 mail client! Instead of using the back button like any other web app, you have to hit ESC to drop from message detail back to the inbox or folder. The back button instead goes to the next message in the queue.

MS 365 is full of mind-boggling UX decisions on top of annoying bugs that have been around for years.


> The back button instead goes to the next message in the queue.

That must be a feature: one could use the back button to open many mails and even reply to them in order to game the employee 'evaluation' metrics.


But the desktop apps are best in class, Word and Excel in particular.


What class is Word best in?

I use it a quite a lot and think it is okay, but it has all sorts of problems and behaviors that don't make a lot of sense.


I used it daily for my work. I prefer Word due to their mail merge for creating certifications (sometime, I have to make 150 certs and mail merge made it so easy). Also, I use it for form creations, Word's table structure is superior and flexible than LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages.

Yea, it does have their quirks. I am aware of those and I know how to work around it or with it. Microsoft Word been around more than 20 years and it have legacy codes in Word to ensure it works with older format and few other oddities.


Track changes. It is an industry standard for legal documents.


`vimdiff new.tex old.tex` is _infinitely_ faster, easier, and so on. Using git provides a far better backup and restore functionality, with searchable history, and multiple branching versions. I've met exactly one lawyer (a barrister) who uses tex and loves it -- it's particularly good at making trial bundles with complicated paginations and cross references -- but he does have the advantage of being an IP barrister with a PhD in particle physics...


But I don't want or care to go to the trouble of setting up tex, git, vim or whatever else. Microsoft has solved that problem for me.


I couldnt imagine working somewhere that relies on email and not using outlook. Gmail is barely tolerable for person use.


The MS account switcher is also terrible. Maybe it’s because I have a mix of outlook-based emails, Azure AD emails, and full O365 emails, but the fact that you can’t easily open an outlook tab for each account is horrible UX.


FF Containers are a much better way to handle this issue then attempting gmail style account switching


Can't remember the tools name, but there is an official MS browser pluggin for using multiple accounts


If you're using Chrome or Edge, setting up multiple profiles is a good way to handle this, as well as separating work and personal stuff. I use profiles to have Teams open for multiple organizations..


Firefox containers, or delete cookies. It is because of how cookies work and not terminating a session upon logout.


> The MS account switcher is also terrible. Maybe it’s because I have a mix of outlook-based emails, Azure AD emails, and full O365 emails, but the fact that you can’t easily open an outlook tab for each account is horrible UX.


I dont like Office 365, but its lightyears ahead of GSuites. Just look at GMail - it can't even handle threads and mail is commonly all messy and unreadable when multiple people start replying. Generally for anything slightly complex GSuites fails.

It's so bad, that I'm thinking my next company has to use Microsoft stuff again - sort of an interview criteria. I'm only semi joking because Outlook and Co seems like a low bar to beat.


Small nitpick, but as of last month, G Suite has been officially renamed as Google Workspace.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/6/21503649/google-workspace...


Maybe if they have time, they fix also the many graphics bugs in (and around) Excel (one funny bug I found just make the left side of the Excel window broken, even the Startmenu, but just on a horizontal FullHD monitor.)


> MS 365 is orders of magnitude worse than g-suite in every regard.

You clearly have never sent/received a calendar invite from a g-suite email to a non-g-suite email. The experience is abysmal.


That hyperbole...




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