Google, Apple, and various, other open and closed sourced alternatives exist for nearly everything in Office. Many of them have been under development for decades by companies that are similar in magnitude to Microsoft.
Lack of competition is definitely a problem in the pricing of some things, but I don’t think this is one of them, people just prefer what Microsoft offers and are willing to pay for it.
In a narrow view, this is true, but from a wider viewpoint Microsoft has few competitors in the "one stop shop for your big business needs" sense.
Google has made some progress here, but doesn't seem interested in a bunch of important spaces (e.g. they have Docs, but don't have anything like Active Directory or Sharepoint that I know of).
Microsoft is also often the default vendor, since virtually every big company has contracts with them for Windows and Office (at least) already.
> but from a wider viewpoint Microsoft has few competitors in the "one stop shop for your big business needs" sense.
This is the big thing that keeps Microsoft lock-in alive. No where else are you going to get: Full office suite, both online & desktop apps, hosted exchange/email, Identity w/ MFA & Conditional Access, EDR, file storage, chat/collab, AI chatbot w/ your Microsoft data as context, and MDM all for $22/user/month (if you have less than 300 users, otherwise you're looking in the range of $35-$50/user/month which is still dirt cheap for what you get). Not to mention all the data protection (purview)/e-discovery stuff also included.
Google Workspace is the next best thing, and doesn't offer all of what MS does for the price.
MS (365) is the only game in town where you can get everything you need for 1 price/subscription.
Microsoft's services are rarely the best at anything, but they are all "good enough", well integrated and will check any and all compliance/regulatory checkboxes you want them to check, and you can generally hammer any of their offerings into whatever you want. Similar to Windows in a way, it wasn't the best at anything in particular, but had everything you needed, and could be made to do whatever with some effort with the benefit of integration into all of MS's enterprisey stuff by default.
> Similar to Windows in a way, it wasn't the best at anything in particular, but had everything you needed, and could be made to do whatever with some effort with the benefit of integration into all of MS's enterprisey stuff by default.
macOS could be better looking and more well-rounded consumer OS but Windows is definitely the best when it comes to providing the most functionally complete APIs. It is also the best when it comes to well-designed future-proof APIs. The backwards compatibility isn't just keeping the functions untouched. It is designing data structures and APIs that can be seamlessly upgraded.
Linux can have DBus etc. but it doesn't go anywhere close to the unified feeling that Win32 and COM APIs provide. Each type of hardware under Linux requires some completely different style (some more functional, some more async, some subsystems are more object-oriented, some APIs are pure text-based the others are IOCtl minefields).
There is a reason CAD software is often Windows-only while many buyers have always been able to buy Macs too (Power, x86 or ARM).
It’s been awhile since I’ve compared, but their office apps mostly are the best at everything. Windows is/was the best at many things.
When someone has that level of success they’re the best at many things, they just may not be the things you appreciate.
But again, others could make these things. Google, Zoho, etc have.
If a company is winning simply because they’re able to prevent meaningful competition (such as Google buying up default search) that’s a failure of regulators.
If a company is winning because people like their product better and they’ve spent a lot in R&D to make it better so it would cost a lot to catch up to, and it has several competitors who just might not be as good, that’s exactly what you hope for.
LibreOffice, in the most primordial form, has been developed since 1985. It's older than Linux.
To be honest though, would I use it for my business? No. Broken formatting (for either my side or a client's side) isn't acceptable; the UI is two decades behind; LibreOffice Calc is still too incomplete; and who knows what's in a C++ codebase that old and that large (100,000+ files, 10M+ LoC) - it's basically security by obscurity. Microsoft Office getting hacked and fixed, is better than a target too small to matter until a government adopts it.
I like LibreOffice... but the people who think LibreOffice is even remotely a competitor to Office 365 have no clue what Office 365 does or why enterprises use it.
> I like LibreOffice... but the people who think LibreOffice is even remotely a competitor to Office 365 have no clue what Office 365 does or why enterprises use it.
I don't think it is even a good competitor if you're actually creating bigger, slightly more professional looking documents / spreadsheets or want some quick working UI as a normal consumer. LibreOffice still cannot do live element updates which has been introduced with Office 2007!
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> the UI is two decades behind;
Still better than the shitshow that is MS UI/UX.