alt Hacker NewsGenuinely, what's the sell of Microsoft 365? I get MS Word, Excel whatever lock in but what is their cloud actually adding that can't be substituted?
Email, chat, video calling, and file storage? All products that have plenty of competitors. We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap.
I would think weening off Windows and the AD "Entra" stack would be a lot harder than commodity office software but at least they can self host that.
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M365 (the business plans) are an insane value, with zero competition. Remote management of devices, zero-touch provisioning of new hardware, full security suite, etc.
There's nothing OSS or commercial that even comes close, especially for the price.
I'm sure the average small business doesn't even use half of the functionality, but it's all there when they want to get serious about security/administration, or it can be outsourced to turnkey MSPs.
The sell is that my manager can send an Excel spreadsheet to everyone and everyone can open the spreadsheet and edit it at the same times while seeing everyone else do their edits. What's the non-MS non-Google solution to this?
> what's the sell of Microsoft 365
> We went with 365 only because it was dirt cheap
You answered your own question.
And frankly, MS Word is really bad. So are pretty much of all their services.
Not sure whether Excel is still good.
It's adding the property that it's an all-in-one turnkey solution. Which is an extremely attractive proposition compared to having a dozen separate tools. And to paraphrase the old adage, nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.