Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/google-picks-another-win-g-suite-airbus-grounds-microsoft-office/

by kbyatnal • 8 years ago

227 152 8 years ago

geekwire.com

MindTooth4• 8 years ago

How to choose between two evils? Guess privacy were not on that list.

komali2• 8 years ago

What sort of loss of privacy would an Enterprise account experience in Office or gsuite?

pintxo• 8 years ago

Local software (Office can still be run local only, I presume) vs cloud software?

MindTooth4• 8 years ago

Google or Microsoft makes their money on analytical data. In other words; we are the product. Not the software.

So what I ment is that they traded one evil for a another one.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

Google's AI-based features are applied to G Suite as well as the public versions, AFAIK. So your emails still get swept up into their deep learning algorithm for generating Smart Replies and the like.

A lot of Google's smart features technically "read your emails", and they are used on your account whether it's paid or not.

aaronarduino3• 8 years ago

Hopefully, this will start a trend away from MS Office to other office programs. Preferably open source solutions.

Analemma_• 8 years ago

Why would you assume moving to GSuite is indicative of a trend toward open-source? You have even less control than with Office.

braderhart8• 8 years ago

That is simply not true. Google has been a much stronger supporter of open source. Ever heard of Android? What about Kubernetes? Chromium?

Also, Google Docs supports exporting to ODS and other document formats... in addition to automatic conversion into Google Drive.

aaronarduino3• 8 years ago

I'm not assuming, I just hope that would be a trend.

folbec• 8 years ago

As a massive POC, I'm happy it happens ... in another company than mine.

Time will tell if it works. If yes prices will go down for everybody.

granttimmerman2• 8 years ago

(Disclaimer: I work on G Suite Open Source) I open sourced our developer samples this week: github.com/gsuitedevs

There's an increasing amount of things you can do with G Suite, almost all our products have APIs and Apps Script libraries.

If there's something missing in our APIs, feel free to let us know.

golergka2• 8 years ago

I'm yet to find a single decent alternative to Excel. It's an excellent data modeling and analysis tool.

And yes, I've learned Python, R and SQL, but these tools are not a replacement for the Excel workflow.

braderhart8• 8 years ago

What features are lacking specifically that LibreOffice, Google Sheets, or some other cross-platform solution doesn't have?

matwood• 8 years ago

I was coming here to say this. Nothing compares to Excel. The problem with replacing Excel is that it has thousands of features, and every user seems to use a different subset of those features.

With that said, a large majority of users can probably get by with what GSuite offers.

aaronarduino3• 8 years ago

It is true, Excel has a wonderful workflow. Something open source with excel workflow combined with R and SQL would be nice.

patrickaljord3• 8 years ago

Did you try Airtable?

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/airtable-blocks

WDCDev• 8 years ago

I agree. I have been using it for over 20 years now, and use it almost daily in many different capacities. Excel along with the entire MS Office suite of applications is ubiquitous across almost every enterprise.

I am curious how Airbus is going to handle external vendors, customers and organizations sending them complex Excel Spreadsheets and Word Documents.

hinkley• 8 years ago

Long have I wished for an open source spreadsheet tool built on a database backend.

I don’t hear the stories as much these days but for ages it was common for contracting firms to come into a place and find they’d been running the whole operation as an Excel spreadsheet and they had a very poor understanding of how complicated it would be to grow their system. Basically a complete rewrite to a DB model.

I thought for sure when Oracle bought Sun that this would be forthcoming but nothing came of it.

legitster• 8 years ago

It's hard to describe why Excel is so good at what it does. The only way I can think to describe it is "the most amount of power for the least amount of work."

aw3c22• 8 years ago

There is nothing comparable to Powerpoint's ease of layout in the open-source world sadly.

r00fus• 8 years ago

Are you serious? Basic animations were super easy to figure out in Google slides, whereas I still stumble in Powerpoint.

Perhaps it's because there's less functionality but I'm only making slides for internal consumption, so it just has to hide/show the relevant info.

paulie_a2• 8 years ago

Good the world needs less PowerPoint

gaius• 8 years ago

In what way is G-Suite open source? The same way as Android.

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

If the result is that we have moved from MS straight into the arms of Google we have won nothing. I wish LibreOffice would get more dev investment from big companies. As of now they are unfortunately way behind MS Office in terms of usability and design.

severino2• 8 years ago

If the result is that we have moved from MS straight into the arms of Google we have won nothing

We would have won, at least, the freedom to use the operating system of our choice. Microsoft software means you eventually need to use theirs.

scrumper• 8 years ago

And moving slower too. Office at least has fairly regular upgrades. Google Apps has barely changed in years.

em3rgent0rdr• 8 years ago

Unfortunately MS keeps changing their doc format, so LibreOffice always has to play catch-up simply to maintain compatibility.

andygcook• 8 years ago

Curious if Airbus moving over to GSuite has anything to do with Google Hangouts Chat launching and being included in GSuite as the final piece of the puzzle. Google didn't have an answer to Microsoft Teams, but now it does.

sidcool• 8 years ago

Hangout chats is nowhere close to teams or slack. It's quite rudimentary

simplyinfinity• 8 years ago

Do you imagine a CEO switching a whole company of this size because google released a new chat app? AFAIK those decisions are planned for a long time & costs are calculated + lost/gained productivity. What a terrible CEO would that be if they switched 130k people on a whim.

jonas21• 8 years ago

I can certainly imagine Airbus having a list of requirements that Google would have to satisfy as part of the contract to switch to GSuite, and it would seem reasonable that group chat might be on that list.

pgm8705• 8 years ago

Not too familiar with MS Teams, but I was pretty excited when Hangouts Chat rolled out a few weeks ago. I figured if we were already paying for GSuite, why not use Hangouts Chat to replace slack? I ended up being terribly disappointed. Hangouts Chat feels more like a message board than it does a chat app. Google needs to put a ton more work into it if they plan on getting people to convert from Slack.

amq• 8 years ago

Maybe the main reason is email hosting, with gmail being so ubiquitous? Second reason could be better integration with mobile platforms. Other than that, one could think that GSuite is cheaper, but it's really roughly the same.

NegativeLatency• 8 years ago

Collaboration on the Microsoft product is not great compared to Google's offering.

Neracked• 8 years ago

It seems strange to use the present tense ("moves to GSuite", "ditches Microsoft") for a change that should take (at least) 5 to 10 years to implement.

Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an office suite makes sense.

joshuamorton2• 8 years ago

5 to 10 years? I think you're vastly overestimating the time it takes to do such a move. Maybe 5-10 months.

ChuckMcM• 8 years ago

There is 'should' and there is 'does' :-) When IBM acquired Blekko they were moving people over to the web based version of Lotus notes at 1,000 employees a month (give or take) and with 450K employees that was a 30+ year timeline (it got faster as they worked out transition kinks but still) the point is that at certain scales these things are a lot more difficult for enterprises than you might expect.

The biggest challenge (as I saw it) was making sure that everyone could email everyone else all through the transition because if email stops, the company stops in that portion.

All of that to say that even though Airbus is one less than a third that many employees (133K vs 450k) its organization complexity is up there. And keeping complex organizations functional and efficient as possible during a large transition is often addressed by keeping the rate of change manageable (aka slower than you would expect).

thesumofall3• 8 years ago

People need to be trained, documents moved and converted, business processes adapted, ... In addition, solutions will have to be found for documents that exceed GSuite’s capabilities. 10 years? No, but 2-3 years for sure.

redm• 8 years ago

I love G-Suite, and I use it daily for documents, sheets, and mail. I can do most things I need to do in sheets. That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.

I suspect this is a general change over as a base solution for all employees. I'm sure there are still parts of Airbus that will continue using Excel, Word, etc.

IMHO this speaks to the fact that Office is overpowered (or bloated depending on how you look at it) for average employee needs; perhaps a cost savings issue too.

spaceflunky• 8 years ago

That said, Sheets is no replacement for Excel nor is the performance on par for complex and dynamic sheets.

I don't think anyone, not even Google, is saying Sheets is a pure replacement for Excel. That said, like 99% of people who use Excel could get by or do better with Sheets.

Excel is crazy powerful, but not everyone needs complex i-banker programmer level power for running a simple program management sheet. And that's the issue GSuite is addressing. Excel is a one size fits all solution, like a shirt that can fit both an infant and a 1200lb gorilla.

JonathonW• 8 years ago

Frankly, Docs, Sheets, and Slides are nowhere even close to Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in terms of feature set and usability. Sheets especially, but even in Docs and Slides I'll run into things I can't do.

Where the G-Suite apps really shine, though, is in collaboration. If I'm working by myself on something, I'll likely do it in Office just because that's where I'm most comfortable. But literally everything I write for work happens in G-Suite (mostly Docs, occasionally Slides), because Google makes simultaneous, real-time collaboration easy and seamless. That's something Office is only just starting to figure out (and too late).

closeparen2• 8 years ago

Collaboration also goes beyond collaborating to produce the document. My company makes decisions in the comments of Google Doc proposals.

Someone1234• 8 years ago

Office 365 is though.

- Microsoft Teams is a [bad] Slack clone.

- Microsoft Planner is a [bad] Trello clone.

- Outlook.com instead of the [bad] Outlook Desktop Application

- Sharepoint online for a CRM

- OneNote online for a shared scratchpad.

The offline versions of Excel, Word, and Power Point have no online rivals but for collaboration Office 365 is one to watch. I'd even argue it has pulled ahead of Gsuite in the last year.

programbreeding• 8 years ago

I haven't used G-Suite in years so I can't really compare it, but I use Excel online (via Office 365) to collaborate in real-time on documents with other employees all the time and it works great.

ams6110• 8 years ago

You're right about the feature set. But, Google's products are good enough for most users. The justification for all the bloat in MS Office was always "people only use 20% of the features but each person's 20% is different." Well Google actually did a pretty good job of identifying the features that most people use. I hardly ever open up MS Office anymore (it isn't even installed on my main work computer).

chasedehan• 8 years ago

My home computers are all linux and GSuite is perfect for almost everything I do. I could see the issue with excel for many people in accounting/finance/etc, but sheets is more than enough for things I do as I don't do anything complex in a spreadsheet.

At work I am forced to use windows and have to use Office for many tasks (including SharePoint - talk about a terrible product) and aren't allowed to use GSuite. If I had a choice, I would make the same decision as Airbus

ebikelaw2• 8 years ago

"Docs ... nowhere even close to Word ... in terms of feature set ... really shine, though, is in collaboration."

Contradiction. If your key feature is collaboration, GSuite is decades ahead of Office.

throwaway84742• 8 years ago

For anything other than Excel, I actually vastly prefer Google stuff. Collaboration features and not having to worry about files outweigh the (small) downsides for me by quite a margin. Sheets is a bit of a laggard, but it’ll get there in another couple of years.

erispoe• 8 years ago

It is true that Sheets isn't as powerful as Excel. But it's a good substitute for 99% of users. And for people dealing with complex models/large amount of data, they should probably use a proper programming language (Python, R) and version control.

sct202• 8 years ago

Google Sheet's limit of 400k cells sounds like a lot, that could be as few as 40k rows with 10 columns (probably lot of them would be dimensional). As someone who works with large amounts of data and business users, it sounds nice to say everyone should learn to code and query, but in practice the business users can get a lot done with a big spreadsheet with fewer errors and less training. I frequently hold classes to teach SQL, and even that is pretty tough for a lot of people to learn and do correctly.

michaelbuckbee• 8 years ago

I think it might have been a Joel on Software story that talked about how when they did a review of what people actually used Excel for they found that a ridiculous number never went beyond "making lists of things".

By that measure, I bet that Google Sheets is likely overpowered compared to most people's use.

I try to keep this in mind when I see things like AirTable (and their recent big funding raise) - because it looks so "listy" and like something people would actually use [1].

Maybe the real differentiator is the ability to easily put checkboxes and pics in a row and much less dependent upon having advanced statistical functions, pivot tables, etc.

1 - https://youtu.be/r0lsyTaAuJE

bluGill• 8 years ago

As I recall the study went a little farther. The majority just used it for making lists. The rest used 10% of the features, but it was a different 10% for each person.

fmavituna• 8 years ago

I think overpowered is the right word for office. When used it doesn't feel bloated or cluttered, it's the pinnacle of Desktop Computing UX.

dismal2• 8 years ago

I think a lot of the more complex stuff excel has historically been used for has appropriately migrated to better suited analytics and data analysis platforms.

wdr1• 8 years ago

Keep in mind Microsoft had to some extent nerfed the non-Windows version of Excel, Word, & Powerpoint.

The hope was to keep people on Windows, but as people started to shift away from Windows, it makes it much easier for them to jump from the sub-par version of MS Office to other products.

discreditable2• 8 years ago

I agree that sheets is no excel, but it does almost everything I need, and a few things better. A few examples:

- JavaScript as a scripting language. (It's no python but it's nicer than vbscript.)

- Builtin regex functions (regexextract, regexmatch, regexreplace).

fauigerzigerk2• 8 years ago

JavaScript is now the main language for writing Office add-ins: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/dev/add-ins/excel/ex...

rkwasny• 8 years ago

Curious if anyone has tried Zoho? how does it compare

dudus• 8 years ago

It compares poorly.

Zoho is to GSuite what OpenOffice is to Microsoft Office.

sridharvembu• 8 years ago

Zoho CEO here. Please take a look at our Workplace suite (Mail, Cliq, Connect, Docs & Office suite - collaboration and productivity) and judge it for yourself. Our Writer (word processor) and Show (presentation) have had major upgrades recently, and Sheet is getting upgraded too.

kozikow• 8 years ago

Airbus became a big user of Google cloud some time ago. Airbus made a presentation on last Google Cloud Next how they migrated core technology systems for satellite imagery storage and analytics to Google Cloud.

Google Apps are a logical extension, as you can use same accounts for Google Cloud and email. There are some benefits of the integration - e.g. export BigQuery result as Google Sheets. They also had a CTO poached from Google.

thesumofall3• 8 years ago

How much of a role did licensing fees play and how much of a role the desire of management to “be modern”? An Office suite is the perfect example of a software that benefits greatly from the speed, usability, OS integration of a native application. Collaboration can easily be achieved with Box, SharePoint, etc. I’m sure there will be employee backlash

ajcodez2• 8 years ago

At a past consulting job the CEO claimed Google was reading his confidential information in the 00’s and refuses to use anything except Office 365. In his case confidence that MS will not act improperly is the most important feature.

snewman• 8 years ago

As an engineer working on Docs and related products from inception through 2010: I would be astonished if this were the case. Had such behavior become known within the engineering team, there would likely have been an uprising. There was no backdoor mechanism for looking documents, at least on the Docs (word processing) side, and in any case this sort of thing Was Not Done. My guess is that things are locked down even more tightly now.

ajcodez2• 8 years ago

I use Docs all the time. It's really nice to hear privacy is important to the team!

golfer• 8 years ago

Sounds like a really paranoid CEO.

sseth• 8 years ago

Interesting. You would think the case of Alex Kibkalo would lead to the opposite conclusion. Microsoft prosecuted a blogger for piracy of Windows software after reading his private hotmail emails.

kasperni• 8 years ago

No Microsoft fanboy, quite the contrary. But ended up installing Office 365 for my SOs business (~ 30 people) last year. And I'm properly impressed, by the amount of progress they do. It is a solid offering for very little money.

Yes something like Teams (Slack Clone) might be feel a bit betaish. But they are starting to add features such as recording of meeting, automatic transcribing and inline message translation.

I really think they are going to be hard to beat in the future.

braderhart8• 8 years ago

Yet they can't even support WebRTC for audio/video in Linux? They are still 5 to 10 years behind everyone else and are a dying company.

JungleGymSam• 8 years ago

Utter nonsense.

pkaye• 8 years ago

The Google products are awesome in synchronization and collaboration between multiple users. Way better than the Microsoft Office 365.

ebikelaw2• 8 years ago

I think the other commentators are really understating the extent to which Google beats Microsoft on realtime collaboration. In Office 365 you can see that someone else has opened the file but you can't see their changes until they Save which is hilariously retro. Google Docs doesn't even have a Save button. In Office if someone else makes a change and saves it you get a popup to merge their changes, or if you save you get a popup to merge your changes with their saves. That's garbage. In Google Docs you and I can edit the same _word_ or even the same character at the same time, with all changes reflected on both sides immediately. No saving, no syncing.

__m• 8 years ago

How can we streamline industrial espionage?

drumhead• 8 years ago

I suspect that certain areas such as Finance might have an exemption from that rule.

neovive• 8 years ago

I think G-Suite found the sweet spot on what most users need from office productivity tools and enhanced it by doubling-down on collaboration.

Regarding advanced usage, I just completed a G-Suite project that leveraged some of the advanced features of Google Sheets and was quite impressed. If you haven't done so already, test out the IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML, IMPORTRANGE, FILTER and QUERY (with group by and pivot) functions. You can build some very nice dashboards, pulling data from multiple sources (web, worksheets) and summarizing into one view. I'll admit that the syntax was peculiar at first, but once you get used to it, it's very powerful--even without App Script. As a web developer, IMPORTHTML/IMPORTXML is actually pretty fun.

interfixus2• 8 years ago

It remains a fair stretch beyond my comprehension how anyone - individual or 100.000+ workforce corporation - could wish to lay their fate and data utterly in the hands of some third party entity.

simonsarris• 8 years ago

Either you've never actually built anything worthwhile or your sentiment approaches the people who say "I never trust anyone" without thinking about what that statement actually means.

Car companies lay their fate of their passengers in third party tire companies and third party brake companies.

Airplane companies lay their product's fate in the hands of third party engines.

Airplane passengers lay their fate utterly in the hands of some third party pilot.

Car drivers lay their fate in car companies and other drivers.

Spreadsheets? Data? Whatever works best right now will do 99.9% of the time.

interfixus2• 8 years ago

Yes, clearly every social interaction is based on some level of trust. Your examples sort of state the obvious.

The point is, I will not drive on shitty tires if I have a reasonable option of good ones. I will not knowingly fly with a drunk pilot if a sober one is available.

Airbus - and nearly everyone I know - happily hand over ultimate control of their data trove to someone else, seemingly without any pressing grounds for doing so.

And yes, I know that is the way of the world these days, however much I may bemoan it. Witness the snide and micro-agression even here on HN whenever someone dares to differ.

mancerayder• 8 years ago

Naïve question here: how is Google able to have Docs and Sheets without getting the crap sued out of them by Microsoft? In a similar way as the OpenOffice and similar reverse engineering efforts avoided getting attacked?

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

Sued for... what exactly? Not only do Docs and Sheets have almost nothing in common with Office besides being... well, an office suite of some sort... Microsoft's DOCX and XLSX formats were offered up as a standard other developers can implement, so compatibility isn't a problem either.

gbenzzz• 8 years ago

I feel sorry for whomever has to administrate that. From an admin perspective, GSuite doesn't hold a candle to Exchange. What do you mean I can't forward a users email, set an OOO reply, or give full access without logging in as the user!?

Airbus moves 130k employees from Microsoft Office to GSuite

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