Seven Years Later, Airbus is Still Trying To Kick Its Microsoft Habit (theregister.com) 92
Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives. Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital.
Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel. Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.
Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel. Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.
Google? wtf (Score:5, Insightful)
Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like.
Re:Google? wtf (Score:5, Interesting)
>"Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like."
Yeah, really.
But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?
Anyway, I had to check... LibreOffice Calc supports more than 1 billion cells from 16,384 columns by 1,048,576 rows. Hope the machine has a lot of RAM if trying to push that :)
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Departmental level bodge jobs done by someone in management who at a *stretch* might try to migrate to Access instead of a real DB when pressured to create a better solution because the current one is choked and falling down.
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Typically excel is all the users are given and all they know, so they bodge things together with the available tools.
Most people never consider that there are better tools for what they're trying to do, nor do they have any experience of such tools.
If someone does, and asks for proper tooling they usually get pushback.
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"because most of the time their work machines are locked down"
This is a company IT initiative. IT can damn well unlock it. Had a customer with lots of Word and Excel users refusing to switch. The owner told them as of X date, MS tools would be removed, and Libre Office installed. They could train for the transition, or be fired for failing productivity metrics. Strangely, all were able to transition to Libre within the time frame. Their "huge spreadsheet" effort took me all of half a day to move to Postgres and PHP with data retention and history.
Why are so many Christians God fearing instead of God loving?
Due to a fundamental
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Let me guess: when push came to shove the users quickly found out that the two programs were similar enough that they could make them work without any extra training.
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Pretty much. The lady that did the spreadsheet was shocked that it worked much better as a web application. She asked for PHP and SQL training. I helped her get the first basics, then since she wanted to change professions pointed her to professional training. I was concerned I'd show her bad habits, not being expert in it.
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It's because every time IC outside of the tech realm tries to branch out past Excel they end up with another external consultant to feed... after a while it just becomes easier to bodge everything in Excel than listen to yet another 15 marketing pitches and then onboard a new consultant they didn't really want in the first place.
If you're lucky to be at least somewhat technically minded you can learn to use Python, sqlite databases and other stuff you can run completely locally without a lot of external IT
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On the other hand, If I have an ultralight and realize I need to move over 200 people at once, I know I'd better talk to a domain expert rather than trying to tie 250 ultralights together with kite string.
Re:Google? wtf (Score:5, Interesting)
20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?
I agree that a database-backed application is the right way to go for that much data. However, Finance used Excel because they could. We all like to talk about how bad an idea it is to do that, but Excel brought financial computations on large data sets to people who can't write any code. It has enabled thousands upon thousands of businesses to do things they couldn't do before without paying a programmer to develop a solution they cannot maintain. The fact that other spreadsheets regularly crater when handed data that Excel has no trouble with is exactly why we have so much Excel.
I like to use Drupal to rapidly create database applications which can handle a lot of data without writing code. But I wouldn't expect someone in accounting to be able to do that at all, and that just shifts the problem domain. Instead of getting stuck with Excel, now I'm getting stuck with Drupal. All of the logic just winds up in a different system that you can't trivially transfer it out of, so you have the same exact maintainability problem, except more people know how to work with Excel.
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>"Saying Libre Office replaces MS Office like saying a tricycle vending cart replaces a step van."
I never said that LibreOffice can replace all the functionality of MS Office for everyone. You must be thinking of someone else. It can, indeed, replace all of what most people do with MS-Office, and most of what the rest do.
>"For instance, Libre Office has no support for group editing."
It does support tracking, authorship, and also "check in/out" on remote file locations, but not really true group edit
Re:Google? wtf (Score:4, Interesting)
Problem with Libreoffice is that they think a lot. I was once told that a bug is so trivial that it would take at most a couple of hours to fix - therefore I should do it myself. Two hours of my time is worth at least a 100 bucks. I offered the user the 100 bucks if they could do it for me. They didn’t accept. A subscription to MS Office for a year is worth 60 bucks.
Guess which one I took. Libreoffice is the new Mozilla in their attitude towards their users. Overtly pro-user, but in reality so out of touch that they don’t understand why they can’t beat the evil company they are competing with.
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But 20 million cells? That seems ridiculous. Why aren't they using a database for something that huge?
I'm agnostic as to whether it should be a proper database implementation without knowing more about the use case.
But, is 2e7 cells really that many? If I spent 5 minutes brainstorming I could probably think of 20 pieces of metadata you'd want in columns of a spreadsheet tracking financial transactions. You'd generate more than a million rows (and so 20+ million cells) in less than a year of tracking just paychecks for their 150,000+ employees.
I'm mostly surprised that Google Sheets chokes on what feel
Re: Google? wtf (Score:2)
I wonder if it is the synchronization problem? Sheets seems to do a better job with live edits, and if they prioritize that over a more delayed batch update, I can see Sheets struggling with cell count especially if those cells have interlocked computations. Purely guessing, though.
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But, is 2e7 cells really that many? If I spent 5 minutes brainstorming I could probably think of 20 pieces of metadata you'd want in columns of a spreadsheet tracking financial transactions
That's exactly why it should be in a database and not a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are best when you have a reasonably limited number of columns. It's also a horrible PITA to use them as a relational database (it's more or less possible, but you don't want to do it) so hiding pieces of that complexity in other sheets in order to limit the data the user interfaces with on the main sheet is just a lot of extra work you wouldn't have to do if you used another solution.
I'm mostly surprised that Google Sheets chokes on what feels like a fairly small amount of data. My best guess is that it's some insane formulas that it struggles with more than the number of cells.
It doesn't really matter where it fails, if
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As mentioned elsewhere, spreadsheets are probably the wrong tool for the for that particular job. Just because one can make a giant sheet in a spreadsheet tool doesn't mean they should. It won't have sufficient indexes to quickly do JOINs or equivalent, for example. Nor proper caching of a data, having more of a file-centric design.
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It's easy to have unique keys in your spreadsheet so that you can easily relate information on different sheets to one another. The problem is, actually doing the processing that a SQL server would do trivially is irritating, and then it will be processed slowly every time. Whatever Excel does or doesn't cache, it isn't enough. You can do big complicated things, but they work slowly, and maintaining it is irritating at best. When you do complicated things either your formulas get long, or you wind up having
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Because I can bet it started out as a way for an engineer to track say, the parts of their little piece of the plane. Maybe it was just all the mechanical bits associated with the inner flap on the right wing. It started as a manual tracking system on pieces of paper and post-it notes.
Then the guy gets handed a spreadsheet, realizes all those little pieces of paper can be consolidated in a nice table that f
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>"to justify to insurance companies why you are using a free open source project as a main tool."
This assumes that MS-Office is somehow less prone to bugs, errors, issues. Just because more people use it, or that it is closed source, or that it isn't free, or that it is from Microsoft, doesn't mean it is safe (or "safer"). It also doesn't necessarily mean there is any liability that can be shifted. Most commercial software requires you to sign away liability (or greatly/specifically limit it, perhaps
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This assumes that MS-Office is somehow less prone to bugs, errors, issues
Not at all (and I'm using LO all he time), but insurance companies might see it that way.
Re: Google? wtf (Score:4, Interesting)
My thoughts exactly!
Switching from something with more privacy and capability to an inferior product, while handing all company data to "do no evil" Google!
Do companies care so little for trade secrets these days?
Capability. (Score:3)
Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like.
Guess that depends on if the like feels like this is more a you problem rather than a capability anyone should be meeting:
..can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells..
Screw the memory issues. 20 million cell spreadsheets should get you drawn and quartered.
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But it still means some diversification in the more general landscape. It also means they can now, for a while, move again with lower effort.
Re: Google? wtf (Score:1)
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LibreOffice doesn't have cloud sharing features that allow multiple users to access a shared file with different permissions.
LibreOffice Calc does allow multiple users to edit a spreadsheet on a network drive, but doesn't have a user permission system or integration with a single login somewhere. The other apps like Writer don't support collaboration at all.
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Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini.
Other way around. Mussolini was less murdery.
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So for example it becomes really really hard to enforce document labeling for different classes of document at different security levels for your company.
This is before we talk about the mess that is active directory equivalence under linux.
I don't really see any solution. Maybe if Microsoft wasn't able to do all the antitrust violations so that a company could come al
Yeah but it works (Score:2)
I think that if you ever do see Linux on the desktop in Mass it'll be because Europe does it in order to get away from Microsoft because of risi
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switching from Hitler to Mussolini
*from Putin to Kim Jung Un.
</updated>
Giant spreadsheets are a sign of morons (Score:5, Insightful)
Time for a database, people. You are using the wrong tool for the job.
Re: Giant spreadsheets are a sign of morons (Score:2)
20 million cells in a spreadsheet?
Re: 20 million cells in a spreadsheet? (Score:1)
which matches their brain-cell count
Often Excel _is_ the right tool for the job. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes you can do it with Pandas, numpy, etc but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well. Porting to something else is time consuming, expensive and risky, even a minor difference in precision or rounding on sheets like these can throw numbers off by millions of dollars/euros/etc. It's also usually more difficult to debug. With the Excel sheets you can see the numbers at each step/stage and an experienced user can pretty quickly identify where something is going wrong.
My background is programming and when I first came across these type of sheets my first reaction was NOPE. But having worked with financial teams on them, I game to realize I was wrong. Excel is exactly what they need. That's changing, more finance staff have experience with python and equivalent data modeling tools but don't be so quick to judge.
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..Porting to something else is time consuming, expensive and risky, even a minor difference in precision or rounding on sheets like these can throw numbers off by millions of dollars/euros/etc.
And yet, no one assumes this problem can exist at scale in Excel?
Are the latest versions of Excel tracking to 42 decimal places and offering rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch, or am I missing something as to how certain flavors (rhymes with sex sell) of inaccuracy are perfectly acceptable in business?
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Given a lot of businesses financial departments use integers to represent money to specifically avoid floating point rounding errors I very much doubt they give a flying fsck about 42 digit precision.
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I suspect the problem is that the rounding in the existing, tested, working application is different than the rounding in the new, untested, copied-directly-from-the-old application.
The specification and requirements for many, maybe most, financial models only exist in the spreadsheet. Assumptions and parameters are continuously updated; rebuilding all of that in another program is a non-trivial activity.
Re:Often Excel _is_ the right tool for the job. (Score:4, Interesting)
Are the latest versions of Excel tracking to 42 decimal places and offering rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch, or am I missing something as to how certain flavors (rhymes with sex sell) of inaccuracy are perfectly acceptable in business?
The problem here is geekmux, not Excel. I've never heard of somebody saying a spreadsheet does, or should, "track[] to 42 decimal places". I don't even know what you meant by "rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch" -- I can tell you what kinds of errors exist for different GNSS satellite and receiver clocks, but rounding errors are dwarfed by others.
If you have some technical complaint, be specific about it rather than trying to be cute, because you run a risk of making yourself look stupid rather than clever. There are some well-known problems with Excel's default behavior, like how it aggressively treats text as dates [progress.org.uk] -- but a lot [duckduckgo.com] of spreadsheet errors and loss of precision are purely user errors.
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Are the latest versions of Excel tracking to 42 decimal places and offering rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch, or am I missing something as to how certain flavors (rhymes with sex sell) of inaccuracy are perfectly acceptable in business?
The problem here is geekmux, not Excel. I've never heard of somebody saying a spreadsheet does, or should, "track[] to 42 decimal places". I don't even know what you meant by "rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch" -- I can tell you what kinds of errors exist for different GNSS satellite and receiver clocks, but rounding errors are dwarfed by others.
If you have some technical complaint, be specific about it rather than trying to be cute, because you run a risk of making yourself look stupid rather than clever. There are some well-known problems with Excel's default behavior, like how it aggressively treats text as dates [progress.org.uk] -- but a lot [duckduckgo.com] of spreadsheet errors and loss of precision are purely user errors.
Just to clarify:
..as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells..
Defending that stupidity is more a you problem. And if you want to know my “technical” complaint, somewhere behind a 20-million cell spreadsheet is someone actually trying to excuse broken default behavior in Excel under the guise of user error. When errors are not the fault of the user, what then is the always-acceptable excuse for the financial messiah?
Part of the acceptable inaccuracy I speak of is the absolute blind adulation for Excel in business. If that program was foun
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Having 20 million cells is entirely orthogonal to your original complaints.
Accepting the use of Excel is not inaccuracy.
Hypothetical future errors are not a reasonable basis for argument about current use.
Your arguments still suck.
Change happens (Score:2)
For one, if a handful of work-groups need Excel, that's not a reason for the rest of the company to use Excel. Most Excel uses will be mundane things. They can allow justifiable exceptions.
Software tools/frameworks I knew well were ordered tossed because the vendor or support structure faded. It happens. Why are financial people given that latitude when almost nobody else is? Change is annoying and creates a learning curve, but inevitable
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There are tools designed for such financial work that use idioms and formulas finance people know. These people outgrew Excel but don't want the usual frustration of converting.
Re: Giant spreadsheets are a sign of morons (Score:2)
Some people are just used to working in this way. The old timers.
But there's also the fact that the numbers in the spreadsheet are just half of the story. Those people need the ability to tweak those numbers and instantly recalculate tens/hundreds of other things.
Using a database would require a very extensive and always-changing frontend which would be an enormous expense.
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Some people are just used to working in this way. The old timers.
But there's also the fact that the numbers in the spreadsheet are just half of the story. Those people need the ability to tweak those numbers and instantly recalculate tens/hundreds of other things.
Uh huh.
And every financial auditor knows damn well what is implied by a “tweak” feature.
Only reason they don’t call that shit out, is job security.
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Some people are just used to working in this way. The old timers.
But there's also the fact that the numbers in the spreadsheet are just half of the story. Those people need the ability to tweak those numbers and instantly recalculate tens/hundreds of other things.
Using a database would require a very extensive and always-changing frontend which would be an enormous expense.
Good points. I'd add time consuming as well because now you have to go to the developer to make changes rather than doing them yourself. A simple quick what if? that takes a few minutes to do now could take days as you get into the development que; costing more time and money than its worth.
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i'm not surprised, lot of companies i worked for used Word for creating tables and Excel for creating documents :)
There are other limitations, like versioning (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google docs that changes the language of the user interface when you go to another country. WTF?
Evergreen news (Score:2)
Sigh. (Score:5, Insightful)
"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.
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"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.
You just called every company dumb. Either that or you just pointed out you have no idea how financial departments work. Massive excel spreadsheets are the mainstay of all large companies and even wall street. In many cases replacing a spreadsheet will require a myriad of interlinked tools, databases, calculation engines, scripts, all suddenly opaque to the end user who ultimately needs a data in a row that is able to be analysed. Most of the best data analytics tools are also designed around the ability to
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"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.
You just called every company dumb. Either that or you just pointed out you have no idea how financial departments work. Massive excel spreadsheets are the mainstay of all large companies and even wall street. In many cases replacing a spreadsheet will require a myriad of interlinked tools, databases, calculation engines, scripts, all suddenly opaque to the end user who ultimately needs a data in a row that is able to be analysed. Most of the best data analytics tools are also designed around the ability to quickly ingest large spreadsheets and export them again.
I'd add they likely have been vetted and mistakes corrected (though some may still exist) and have proven to be good tools. Trying to convert that would introduce new mistakes, you'd likely lose data, etc. As long as it works don't try to make it 'better' because better may not be better.
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Trying to convert that would introduce new mistakes, you'd likely lose data, etc.
But surely the accountants will be totally understanding when the developers (probably from a consulting firm, or at best another department) will inform them that the mistakes are because the specification they were provided wasn't sufficiently clear! All that's needed to clear them up is a costly change order.
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Most companies *are* dumb.
If 18 months to switch is too ambitious, you are doing things wrong.
If you are relying on 20 million+ lines of spreadsheets, you are doing things wrong.
20 million cell spreadsheets are NOT common for financial departments, or businesses in general. That many cells being used in a spreadsheet can, and will, cause performance issues, as well as a slew of other problems, with Excel. Everything that a spreadsheet holds (in terms of raw data) can be stored in a database from which you c
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If 18 months to switch is too ambitious, you are doing things wrong.
Why switch at all? You're promoting an ideology to a technical problem / solution. What benefit does your approach bring?
If you are relying on 20 million+ lines of spreadsheets, you are doing things wrong.
Again you're simply clueless as to how things works. Not all spreadsheets are simple datasets. There's a reason they were used in the first place, and one of those is that IT people for all their genius in administrating absolutely suck at doing end user's actual work. Virtually all attempts to replace complex large spreadsheets with something "better" fails.
20 million cell spreadsheets are NOT common for financial departments, or businesses in general.
Saying something repeatedly do
20 million cells in a spreadsheet?!? (Score:2)
So they can build airliners but haven't heard of databases?
Excel is so opaque, how do they debug their formulae?
Re:20 million cells in a spreadsheet?!? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, most no-one using spreadsheets has any idea they are actually doing programming. In this case, on this scale, real system programming, not trivial scripting. They have never heard of methods and safeguards. Ask them how they document their code and they will stare blankly at you. Ask how they test it, Same. Ask them how they manage versions, same.
The result is their work is full of errors, if you look hard enough. But they have no idea in the maze of loops, iterations and go-tos that their code (which they don't even know is code) is full of.
The fundamental problem is mixing code and data in one object without any space for comments or documentation. Hopeless. If its anything but finance they are doing this with, its a miracle the planes even take off.
I well rememberr a young woman with a liberal arts degree talking to me about her first exposure to spreadsheets. She was absolutely delighted at the power and ease of it. Yes, I said, but be careful, you are actually doing programming. A blank look.
Why spoil the party?
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These types of people know two things:
- How to use Excel
- That if anyone finds out what they do in Excel really is, and how easily it could be programmed as a report from real data, they would be out of a job.
Instead they get titles like "Chief Financial Officer", "Controller" and "Senior Accountant".
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it" - Sinclair, U. I'd probably change that to "communicate" instead of understand.
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There is a level of truth to that, but a big part is also the way they treat the data. Many financial spreadsheets I have worked with over the years have few complex formulas and each step of a calculation is shown as a discrete cell. It makes it easy to verify data, even in printed form.
In the past I have used a few multi-million cell spreadsheets for engineering-- you get a csv file from a utility with 15-minute interval data for a few years and you start with over a half million cells, perform some basic
A lot of people are simply used to MS (Score:3)
Having a spreadsheet with 20M cells .. (Score:2)
It should be in a database.
Who ever created it should be ordered to check all the calculations with a 1960's mechanical calculator each time there is an update.
Big, BIG companies should know better (Score:3)
Big MEGAcorps should really know better.
IT may not be their bread and butter, but goddam it, these sized corps have resources. They can take the code base for LibreOffice or whatever Open Sourced tool they have and mandate THAT as the corporate standard.
They can even run their own cloud. That's pretty well how AWS started ... spare capacity.
10 person mum and dad store? Nah, I'm going to cut some slack and say "buy one of these pre-canned products".
The MEGACorps can then have their own sub-company to do the IT bit, outsourcing where necessary, but maintaining the tools. So long as they give the source to the parent company, that is ok by GPL.
They can pull updates and patches where necessary but still keep the control.
And that is what the MEGA IT CORPS have. Control. Control means $$$$ (or whatever currency you like). Airbus have taken a bite out of the poisoned apple, spat it out, tried the other poisoned apple and are now chewing on the worst bits of both.
(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)
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(Shuffles off and mutters something about how does a greybeard get Vulture Capitalist funding to setup cross continental niche cloud for people that value stability over shiny, with Open Source ... Open Stack ... Cloudified LibreOffice, Ceph, my lawn)
Every tech company needs at least three things to start with: The business guy, the brain, and the lawyer. Ideally there should also be a marketing guy, but you can add them in later. Also, none of them have to be male, I just like saying "guy", buddy.
Worthwhile things can take a while (Score:3)
While Google is probably not the best choice, the move also causes increased flexibility. They will now, for a while, be able to move again with relatively low effort.
That the move is difficult just shows how direly needed it is.
Excel is a platform. (Score:2)
Or at least it's used as one.
And that does have it's advantages, believe it or not.
Any untrained office worker can open an Excel sheet and run the app that's built with it without any extra training or security and privilege stuff getting in the way. Office workers can build their own logic without having to shop around for some developer to take care of their problem and the ERP budget doesn't have to be touched. And it's even modern purely functional programming. ... That's how you eventually get Shadow
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Untrained? Excel is a spreadsheet tool within the MS Office suite with 27,000 features. It requires a tad more training than handing a moron a hammer
Yes and no, depending. If you are building an application in Excel, yes, all you said is true. If you are using one, no, none of it is. Spreadsheets can be set up such that the user just stuffs data into them where they are supposed to, then clicks a button to get results. Or maybe they don't even have to hit a button.
For the simplest useful example I can think of, I put together a spreadsheet which produces a table we use for asset valuation. This spreadsheet changes every year. If you load my spreadsheet,
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The same untrained office worker can open a web interface in the same way...
With excel that untrained office worker can mess with the calculations and get invalid results, with a well designed web interface they cannot.
You don't want the untrained workers actually setting up the system, you want someone competent and experienced doing that to ensure that the calculations are accurate.
Switch to Libreoffice instead (Score:3, Informative)
1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns per sheet, which results in a maximum of 1,073,741,824 cells (or over 1 billion). A single spreadsheet can contain up to 10,000 individual sheets."
One of many comparisons:
https://www.zdnet.com/home-and-office/work-life/6-ways-libreoffice-is-better-than-google-docs-for-serious-writing-work/
So: Can Libreoffice handle 20 million cells ? (Score:2)
I have just started a script to fill a Libreoffice Calc spreadsheet with 20 million cells on my midrange Windows(sic) PC.
It's not fast, but I will post the result when done.
( If it was a real news site, one would assume they would have asked about this, but The Register is for jokes and gossip, not facts. )
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Drop Microsoft AND Google.
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Computers are amazing, Open Source code is amazing.
Spreadsheets and databases (Score:2)
Don't the various spreadsheet programs have a means to link specified cells to a query or table in a database?
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In some cases a database connection is where the data comes from; but the number of cells grows because it's conceptually easier(and in practice often less opaque, given the ugliness of displaying very large cell contents) to munge on the data step by step rather than trying to ram everything into one transformation.
cloud-based alternatives? (Score:2)
The cloud is a trap
Run away
Look at all the ignorant nerds! (Score:1)
The posts here are largely hilarious.
Just switch to Libre? Have you ever used that shit? Real world use almost always involves niche features and specific behaviors of Microsoft products that the typical /. nerd never uses because all he does is write emails.
Just use a database? Spoken like somebody who has never worked outside engineering. Databases can certainly do a lot but not in ways that make sense or are useful for most let alone every situation. I cab hammer a screw but it's not best practices.
Just
That's a lot of effort... (Score:2)
To potentially be in a worse place than you started. But, hey, sunk costs and all that. Honestly, what is the savings really going to be after Google cranks up your per-user costs when they have captured enough of your data so that you can't switch back?
Microsoft makes money on Windows and Office because it is good enough for the job and has a decent ROI. It's their core business. Sure, they want you on Azure. But, hey, you want on-premise? Happy to sell it to you as well.
Google Workspace could be left to l
You can't completely switch to Google (Score:2)
Take sheets for example, there are plenty of functions and features that don't cross over and certainly if you're not willing to learn new skills.