Enterprise IT is conservative and full of strange politics that make it really dangerous for an admin team or it department to stick their head out and do something independent other then follow the "mythical industry best practice" and MS is extremely good at manipulating what gets considered "industry best practice" to their advantage and then give just enough discount on the more visible parts of the costs to look cheaper.
And it's a open secret that individual employee productivity don't matter all that much in the kind of back end work where a PC was ever a feasible tool, as what really counts for profitability is the non-pc using frontline staff's productivity, who is far more likely to be issued either no computers or mobile phones or tablet then wintel laptops.
Have you tried the competing software in a business environment, it is pretty easy to see why MS productivity software dominates.
For like $12/u/month you get full web and desktop office software, MFA, and AzureAD, which you can use as a SSO indentity provider for free, for one lisc that cost $4/m you can then make use of conditional access policies that give you massive options over how you manage an access all aspects of the tenant.
They now are giving teams (slack knockoff) a free dialing number so it now can be used for phone conferencing without non-organizational people.
Onedrive gives you 1Tb of syncable storage per user, and 1TB per user pool for shared office resources.
I spent years as a google apps advocate, but seriously for the money, no one touchs what MS is offering right now.
Google had MS hands down 10 years ago, and let google apps die on the vine. It is a damn shame too, because they were the only ones that have anything comparable.
Having just been put through the switch from google apps + slack to the full ms365 suite including teams I have to agree and disagree.
On paper microsoft absolutely has the best offering. The ms365 suite has everything anyone could ever need. But, in practice it feels more like a downgrade than an upgrade. Teams does everything, and all of it just as poorly. Office does everything, but the web version and collaboration features are so far behind google they are not comparable. Sharepoint and onedrive seem superior to google drive, but in practice there are many papercuts and people struggle to understand where to put documents and how to properly share them.
What microsoft seems to lack is caring about user experience as they slather feature layer after feature layer on top of their products. What google seems to lack is incentive to actually meaningfully improve their product, because I couldn‘t tell you a single meaningful feature they added to g suite over the last five years.
> What microsoft seems to lack is caring about user experience as they slather feature layer after feature layer on top of their products.
That's the problem of selling something to the supervisor and not the actual user. MS has had that corporate world as a cash cow for three decades now. They don't care about the end user they just care that their product looks better in the slide that compares it to the best alternative.
> but seriously for the money, no one touchs what MS is offering right now. Google had MS hands down 10 years ago, and let google apps die on the vine
You're right, for the money MS gives the user a lot of fairly crappy products (other than the office desktop suite). Google was positioned to own this, and they let is drop. It shows what it means to be a product driven company (MS) vs. whatever Google does nowadays (milk search ads?).
There are teams of people in MS whose only job is to think about how to package something for sale. If Google had a single person doing that they would have beat Slack before it got huge, and could have owned office collaboration software as it all moved to the web.
Can you give more details on the "1 TB per user pool for shared office resources"? I always thought there was a user-level limit of 1 TB for OneDrive, and a organization-level limit of 1 TB + (10 GB)*(number of users) for Sharepoint.[0]
And I've never found any documentation as to whether shared OneDrive folders count against the owner's quota, all of the users with permissions quota, or the sharepoint quota.
Firstly this is complex, it depends on what plans and tiers you have, your resell partner, and what region you are in.
But the basics each user gets their own quota of 1 to 5tb,then there is also a shared quota (share point, Ms group storage, powershell online environment, dataverse, etc... ) of 1 to 25tb + (x size per user) the size per user depends on a multitude of factors.
I did not mean to imply that users limits are connected to the shared pool, it is in addition to the user quotas.
I am in a position at $dayjob where I have been mandated to find savings wherever possible. Currently a Google workspace company, I absolutely loathe Microsoft's offerings but after doing my due diligence there is no way I can avoid recommending migration. The pricing is just too good even with the warts, and the extra features are things we already need.
Fuck teams, though. I will leave this company before migrating Slack into teams. Actively recommending that product is nothing short of professional negligence.
The lost hours are totally invisible (most companies wouldn't even allow you to report them. they don't WANT to see them) and the alternative world without lost hours with more productivity can also not be imagined by those in charge.
For all it's terrible bugs and login issues, is there even alterative with similar functionality that would be as "user friendly" (as in: non-tech people would know how to use it as well as they use Microsoft garbage?).
I literally can't think of any alternatives that comes close in functionality OR has the same ease of use for non tech people and wouldn't waste even more time.
I am a linux guy, always have been. But when I went from a Windows environment company to a Mac company I was absolutely shocked by how much less work I had to do with Mac to get everything working. Authentication, logging in, slack vs teams, just everything worked so much better.
Mac is not an alternative functionality to: Teams, Outlook, MS Office, etc? It doesn't solve the MS crappy auth system, it doesn't give (large) businesses the same functionality that MS is giving them.
On the Mac, you can use those MS products without it taking over your user account.
You can also use any of various other products that compete with them (Google Apps, iWork, Zoom, etc).
Just because MS makes a specific package that businesses like doesn't mean that they can't use something else if MS is becoming more of a problem than they're worth.
I think Linux + Wine should be fine for most people (with a little guidance, of course).
ReactOS isn't stable enough even in a VM right now – but the progress is nice, and I hope it will be a viable alternative for embedded applications (like ATMs or factory automation stuff). Maybe consumer use one day, too?
I’m blown away by this. I’ve come back to a full MS stack after years away and it’s grim. Machine shave to be restarted once or more times per day. My personal MacBook is restarted every month or two. I used to moan about Apple’s software quality, but maybe we are actually in Isaac Asimov’s accelerating decline to a dark age.
Not to support Windows, but what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day?
I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time so I don't have to reopen 5 different windows and arrange them across three screens for uni work every evening. It works fine.
Mind you, if it was a Mac I'd not even have to reopen or arrange them after restarting the machine - they'd still be there. Although my work Mac loves to randomise which display gets which windows and desktop background... And randomly pan all bluetooth audio to the left ear once a week. I guess all OS's have their issues.
> I leave my personal Windows 10 desktop running for about a month at a time
My Win10 Home desktop downloads updates when I'm not looking - and sometimes when I'm actually using the thing - and then reboots all on its own. I have no control over this; there have been occasions when the reboot has happened while I was working.
I've been using this method for years and it works great. It uses a windows debug feature to launch cmd instead of the reboot scheduler. You never see the cmd window, as it's launched by SYSTEM. This prevents Windows update from scheduling a reboot, otherwise the system function as normal. You do need to reboot periodically, but now it's on your schedule.
> what are you doing that requires restarts multiple times per day?
Outlook, Teams, Chrome, COMRAD (radiology RIS), Spotify and InteleViewer (DICOM viewer). Without restarts Spotify stops working, the software loses track of what day it is (it assumes the day prior) and things get slow or unresponsive.
Maybe it’s the software and not the OS. I run all those except COMRAD on a Mac ok though.
Mac and multi display and window location is a special hell. My father is a heavy Photohop user and palette organisation is a daily battle with multi screen. When screens wake up windows and palettes reorganise if the system detects one screen and not two briefly. It’s a big drain on productivity.
Yea I dont support Microsoft either but I do have to run it on multipule machines for work and I don't need to restart unless to switch into Linux. It sounds like one of your apps has a memory leak or something. Do you check task manager for resource hogging?
We have 80k Windows users we have to force to reboot every couple of weeks to make sure updates to all the software take (yeah...that's a problem but a different problem). If you're rebooting once a day, you have problems other than Microsoft.
Because as someone who has done support for a 28000 person organisation, 27500 of which are using mostly Microsoft products on windows for 90% of the time and 500 of which are using Mac or Linux and doing other stuff I can tell you that at least 50% of the security incidents and second line support issues came from those 500 users.
This seems like a clear case of selection bias. People with Linux and Mac are probably devs and technical people who will obviously utilize a much broader range of functionality of their machines and thus encounter more edge cases.
A few years ago, there was a video game developer who pointed out the disproportionate number of bug reports that came from their Linux players, and how grateful they were for it. The majority of the bugs reported by Linux users were not Linux-specific, and frequently had detailed descriptions of expected via observed behavior, exact steps to reproduce, core dumps, etc. Because the bug reports were coming from a group who is used to making effective bug reports, they could be used more effectively.
As I said they took up about 50% of the second line support capacity for the entire organisation. So yes they were properly supported, unless you want a dedicated tech to hold the hand of every exec, dev and bioinformatician.
While it is entirely possible the problem here is those execs, devs and bioinformaticians. There do seem to be many other common factors than the macs here.
Maybe they all need nonstandard software? God forbid, maybe they need administration permissions, but the org doesn’t want to give it to them, so they end up calling in every other day to get something unlocked (I know that’d be true for me).
Maybe it’s the problem solving skills of the IT team when it comes to mac, so people keep coming back with the same issues (good ones are Outlook/Teams being permanently broken, or VPN not connecting).
On the whole, I’d steer away from any explanation that would require all 500 mac users to be idiots.
Or the technical infrastructure doesn’t support them well. Or the support team doesn’t know MacOS or Linux, so it becomes a lot harder to provide support. There could be many reasons.
MS makes it very easy to secure and admin at massive scale. You can roll out policies and updates to hundreds of thousands of machines with like 1-2 admins, and the other 8 IT people manage 200 Linux and Mac machines.
Oh, so it's not the users at all, it's that you have tools to manage Windows and didn't set up tools to manage anything else even though they exist; like a Linux admin complaining that Windows is unmanageable because ansible doesn't work well on it.
You're maliciously misunderstanding. The tools available to manage Windows are simply either much, much better, or much better value.
And everything just works out of the box with like... 3 lines of PowerShell.
You can replicate some of it with Ansible, sticky tape and a few spare weeks, but it's not the same at all.
I'm actually Linux admin, grew up with open source and spent my career serving pages and automating myself out of a job. I dislike Microsoft as much as the next guy, but for enterprise use they are _next fucking level_.
They also make it really easy to screw things up. I work at Microsoft, and a few weeks ago they rolled out a botched group policy change for our whole org that somehow deleted all O365 apps and Docker from most people’s machines. The best part is you’d try to launch, say, Excel and you’d get an error about it being removed for being possibly malicious.
This statement says next to nothing but may give the impression that it does to anyone who doesn't think twice on what it actually says. OS X and OS Y both have their good and bad sides but not necessarily near similar in terms of features and execution.
It's not an argument not should it be used as such.
Microsoft's dark patterns philosophy and how that translates into real-world user experiences is the worst I have ever seen. And since they are implementing these dark patterns into the OS it has the potential to make using Windows very difficult. I understand that, with knowledge, you can get around that.. But I dont see why anyone would want to any more.
Apple is really bad too, but there not as bad in the dark patterns market at least in the OS. But they are way strict with their walled garden approach to everything so I wont support them either.
Linux can be buggy at times, but I feel much safer using this OS then I do Windows or MacOS because Microsoft and Apple don't really seem to care to much about the ramifications of their end-user hostile decisions.
What are the ramifications of apples “end-user hostile decisions” aside from the walled garden on iOS? And having to click security -> run anyway for unsigned apps?
I think how their approach to usability and security actually translates to a lack of user-freedom. We had a discussion recently about activation lock on hackernews. On paper and in the world of security, its a great mechanism to prevent theft. But it also causes friction for device re-use with people that don't understand they need to decouple their online identity from their device, this has a negative impact on recycling. It also seems like Apple wants to herd people into purchasing new devices sooner than they should, when the should be doing all they can to make devices last.
This is also related to trying to control the circulation of replacement parts by attempting to force independent repair centers to regulate how parts are distributed. Apple takes more of a "You don't know what you are doing, so we have to guide you in the right direction" approach that doesn't sit too well with me. Apple can be wrong, a lot, about how their decisions effects people's freedom to decide how to implement there own security and ways of retiring devices. Apple should be in the business of making hardware and making it usable. Not being a parent, deciding how people are going to use and secure their devices. Maybe leaving that to an impartial organization that works with apple. Too many conflicts of interest for me.
Try and talk the C-suite and Accounts people at $NonTechBusiness into using LibreOffice or Google Docs instead of Excel and Outlook and let me know how you go.
Linux was not and is not cheap at all. Downloading it might be free, but the initial price doesn't matter compared the cost of running it for a whole organization.
We are literally in a threat complaining that the cost of Windows is wildly higher than the cost of buying a box copy of the software. So yeah, in this context Linux is free.
this is true; they look at dollar amounts first and do not look at quality; repeated over and over by people .. and it feels nobody seems to even care.
Is moving a personal account to a different country an insanely obscure edge case?
Because I tried to do that recently with O365 and I literally couldn't move my subscription without killing the old one and creating a new one.
Every other software service I use somehow managed to make it easy: fill in the new billing details. Done.
But not Microsoft. Billing and fulfilment details are on different pages, there's no obvious way to get from one to the other, and if you want to change country you can't.
I have literally received (temporary) work visas for other countries, travelled, etc etc with greater ease than moving some online accounts I have (Apple).
Even having physical copies of The Economist follow me, with the same subscription, was easier.
