[amanzi]

Here in NZ, pretty much all medium/large businesses and govt departments have gone all-in with M365. Most govt departments are on the E5 licence, and have also started to roll out the Copilot licences too.

The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive. It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues. It's all the data stored in SharePoint Online, the metadata, permissions, data governance, etc. It's the Teams meetings, voice calls, chats and channels. All the security policies that are implemented with Entra and Defender. All the desktop and mobile management that is done through Intune. And the list just goes on and on.

Microsoft bundles so many things with M365, that when you're already paying for an E5 licence for each user, it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible.

Take a look at the full feature list to get an idea of what's included: https://www.microsoft.com/en-nz/microsoft-365/enterprise/mic...

And of course, the more you consume, the harder it is to get out...

[jdietrich]

To reiterate a crucial point in this comment, replacing the Office apps is the least of the issues. Enterpise customers rely on 365 for identity management, endpoint protection, business intelligence and a whole bunch of other stuff that the average user pays no attention to. We aren't talking about replacing an office suite, but an entire model of IT infrastructure management.

[RedShift1]

We're back in the mainframe times boys, good luck everyone.

[wvenable]

> The cost and complexity and the effort required to switch away from M365 is massive.

I'd say further to that is there literally isn't a similar product that exists to switch to. Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

[dabockster]

> Nobody has developed a real alternative. It seems like most companies are more than willing to leave this entire market to Microsoft.

I'd say it's more that this is the actual "developer shortage" that was being talked about a decade ago, but everyone mistakenly and stupidly interpreted it to be a shortage of tech workers for the larger firms. The number of humans that are literate enough in business, marketing, communications, and software development to pull this off are extremely few and far between right now. And even then, I just listed four specialties that historically have been specialized by a single person for each field - something like this would require a given person having a sufficient breadth of knowledge in all of them at the same time. It's a very tall order.

And that's all just to compete on Windows. Adding Mac and Linux into the mix makes it even harder.

[conception]

Microsoft is a buffet. You can get anything you want but it’s rare people leave a buffet saying “Man that food was great!”

Usually people go to different places for different things of better quality. This is clear because there are lots of very successful competing products to Microsoft’s buffet.

The only moat I’d say Microsoft actually has is Excel. And maybe Powerpoint.

Everything else can be replaced easily and often with a far better dish.

[zelphirkalt]

No one has developed a full alternative in one package. That's because some of the practices are really bad and shouldn't be solved the way the GP describes they are solved. Data stored in SharePoint, the worst MS tool ever maybe, is one example. O e wouldn't build another SharePoint, because why make something that sucks so much and then store data in it? It is moronic to do that.

And the GP is right in that the more moronic stuff people do, the harder it gets for them to no longer do that and somehow extract all their data into usable and useful form. Microsoft will happily go on making bad products, if that keeps its users prisoners.

[crazygringo]

Google Workspace is the similar product. It does basically all the same stuff. Tons of companies use it instead.

It's just extremely complicated to transition between the two. So Google is more popular with newer companies, since it's a bit more seamless being cloud-native, whereas Microsoft has inertia with companies that have been around longer.

[ivan_gammel]

It is perfectly possible to run a company with at least 1k employees on non-MS stack, throwing a bone of Office apps to (small) legal and accounting teams, so that they approve the budget. I did that before.

[bluedino]

How did it get this way?

A million years ago we had Microsoft Office, PerfectOffice, Lotus SmartSuite, Lotus Symphony (which became one of the free suites), and others I can't remember.

Then we had a bunch of Java and web versions built of various office appplications.

It would be a massive undertaking to create a new office suite from scratch.

[otterley]

It depends on your needs. Many businesses get along fine with Google Apps or Zoho.

[b3lvedere]

There are thousands of alternatives, but they are not connected as seamlessly like Microsoft would like to think you it all is.

On Microsoft admin/entra/management webpages each weblink does something completely different, yet it provides a very convenient interface.

[giancarlostoro]

An all in one? No, maybe Google Workspace. But for all those pieces you can get all that functionality from different vendors / open source projects.

I guess there's a strong opportunity for someone to build a Linux distro that bundles all of it for you in such a way you could use it OOTB for a company.

[the__alchemist]

You're not kidding! I did a deep dive into this a few months ago, and the alternative situation was dismal! LibreOffice is the closest, but its performance has room for improvement.

[chaostheory]

Zoho Office isn’t bad.

It looks like a lot of the project planning SAAS are trying to take the crown too.

It’s just strange that Google seemingly gave up.

[willvarfar]

I suspect my country is the same. I expect most countries are the same.

Is there basically any expectation that the US government doesn't know the internal goals and thoughts of all other governments just by reading the cloud?

[grishka]

Russia is definitely not the same. I suspect they are still largely using (pirated) Microsoft products but cloud services hosted abroad are a big no-no.

[fungi]

IT departments often lack the skills and/or desire to use anything but MS

[vee-kay]

Reverse argument is true as well.. If corporations were not using buggy/fragile, complex, and potentially vulnerable products from Microsoft & other vendors (e.g., Oracle), there may NOT have been need of so many skilled engineers and IT departments.

[hexbin010]

It's funny reading the child comments completely glossing over your comment and just suggesting using Zoho or Google Docs lol

[amanzi]

I know! Google *Workspace* is about the closest competitor to M365, but here in NZ I don't see any large orgs switching to it. There was one that I knew about it, but they switched back to M365 after a couple of years.

[baka367]

Europe is doing a pretty good job on slowly veering off this addiction. Might be worth reaching out to them for knowledge sharing or two

[wqaatwt]

Is it? The whole thing about replacing MS with OpenOffice and the LibreOffice or etc. has been going on for decades in Europe. Usually it’s just talk or a few municipalities that try it and then silently revert back to MS soon after.

[pjc50]

Europe has just started making a few inroads in a few places. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question. This is basically 1% of what would need to be done to be secure against state mandated compromise of Microsoft.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-Microsoft-Schleswig-Hol...

[ragebol]

Are we really? As much as I want to believe this and as much as some people want this, is is not yet the case AFAIK. Some govts. had some success recently though, like Schlesswig-Holstein.

The Dutch tax administration is currently busy pushing all of their internal docs etc to Microsoft as well, so much chagrin of course: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/makelaarstaal-over-onze-be... (in Dutch, although the author has good stuff in English as well)

[exasperaited]

Well Europe had better hope this is true, because we are heading to a future where US SaaS products should be treated with at least the same level of suspicion as those Israeli fleet management apps that keep turning up on Samsung Android devices.

At the moment you can more or less, I suppose, trust that Microsoft, Google and Apple are not actively spying for the newly anti-European goals of a protofascist federal government, but I am not sure that trust should be extended to cloud service providers more generally, let alone social media companies.

Europe has maybe two years to find a new level of technology independence and it cannot wait.

Trump's government has made it text, not just subtext, that they intend to interfere with further European integration (which is also — coincidentally or not — Russia's top foreign policy goal).

The EU should assume that this is a declaration of cold war and act accordingly:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/09/donald...

[b3lvedere]

"it makes financial sense to go all-in and use as much as possible."

.. until it doesn't.

There is a very good reason why switching away from M365 is almost impossible.

There is a very good reason why Microsoft offers free consultancy for a while if you just keep using M365.

Microsoft has made the world dependent on them. They are one of the biggest corporations that use drug lord tactics to keep its users.

The European Union sees it and is trying to fight it with all its might. Which is very very difficult when you're fighting a company that has more power than certain governments. It's like fighting the drug lord while still purchasing opiods from him.

[crazygringo]

> drug lord tactics to keep its users.

What on earth are you talking about?

Companies switch from MS to Google Workspace all the time. It's a huge logistical challenge, not because of anything Microsoft does, but just because they're different systems and migrating data and processes is inherently hard.

[hulitu]

> Which is very very difficult when

... they pay so good. It is funny how politicians forget about everything when they see a green piece of paper on the table.

[no_carrier]

There was a time in the 90s when quite a number of governments were aware of this Microsoft problem and insisted on open formats, so that important govt records and data could be open down the track. It seems like all of that was forgotten and traded for 'convenience'.

[wodenokoto]

This is why I’m surprised by headlines like this”nobody wants to by Microsoft’s AI” like, every corporate M365 user must be either considering it or already started the purchasing process.

[pjc50]

Like a lot of enterprise features, the actual users have hatred or indifference, but the purchasing carries on anyway.

[amanzi]

Yep, and a lot of the responses to those "nobody wants to by Microsoft's AI" articles seem to get confused with the annoying copilot buttons that are popping up everywhere, and the actual enterprise-AI features that MS are pushing. I've seen and heard of a lot of uptake in the M365 AI paid features, and they seem genuinely useful - you can build and publish agents that have access to internal documents, staff can ask copilot to summarise their last day's worth of emails, transcribe Teams meetings with summaries, etc, etc. All protected by the same controls that you already get with M365 (further locking you in!)

[aryonoco]

Same in Australia

[jmward01]

Vendor lock-in has always been the product.

[joe_the_user]

OK, supposed Claude in X many years could write a drop in replacement for every single one of those things. Would you raise your rates in the meantime too?