Why? What feature does office 365 have that is so difficult to replace? I'm guessing support but... is there something more obvious?

Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.

Office 365 these days is SSO (Include Enterprise cloud apps in the bargain),Cloud Documents, Email, Teams(Telephony and Chat) . Word, Excel and Outlook, what outsiders think of as "office" client side apps, are just a gimme. Heck thats just in brief, most of my customers are in deeper than that. Throw in Cloud Compute, and VDI as experiences that are just that much easier using Azure and 365 than other providers.

Not to mention, the data guarantees around Copilot are super enterprise compatible. Its not that companies want copilot, its that they know if they don't provide a solution, users will desire path into something with dodgy data security. So they provide "The Best" in the IBM sense of protecting the business and their jobs, which is Copilot.

It takes a bit of doing but your end state is, user logs into PC, signs in SSO, they get all their apps (remote and local), their emails, their documents, their collab and neither they or you need to think about it.

Oh and to continue, theres the whole Purview suite which is purpose built to integrate into large business data security incidents. I know of MSPs who wont be seen without Exchanges litigation hold / related tools because they have been saved from prosecution. Defender has not just grown more tentacles its like 3 different complete octopi at this point. Defender for Endpoint is particularly difficult to get away from because it does so damn much in the way of logging and monitoring for very little standup cost.

If you sat down most large orgs and created a list of what they may need to replace if they were getting rid of Office365 + supporting/supported features you would probably find its a lot more work. They are everywhere. Theres a turnkey(ish) microsoft solution that grows out the side of 365s head for every big business problem.

Intune. Hello. Man it just keeps going on.

Libre office can mostly replace Word, Excel, PowerPoint. But Office 365 or M365 (or whatever the brand name is today) is a huge suite of cloud collaboration and administration tools, including personal and corporate-level cloud storage, app delivery, integration with enterprise accounts and other corporate tools, email, and many other more niche/obscure things. At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.

> At this point, Microsoft could probably discontinue Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and still not lose many M365 customers.

Yeah, just as we forgot about the "paperless office" metric we seemingly forgot about MS Office file formats. "But can I open that file someone sends me?" hasn't been the central driver in quite a while.

But I guess it's a bit of a moat nonetheless: IT departments just not considering any other cloud solution that would (in addition to the pains of the cloud migration) also require weening employees off Excel/Word/Powerpoint. People don't even ask themselves wether that would (still) be hard or not, it feels like a safe assumption that it will.

And what if that is actually useful ? I guess email ?

In enterprise? All of it.

The office you are talking about is not what it used to be a few decades ago. I am not into this world but what I know of it is like you are comparing a tool to the whole workshop. No, the tool does not replace the workshop, the tool is a very small part of the workshop.

There are alternatives but when you have bought into the full ecosystem of MS, it will take a lot of work to move.

(Full disclosure: I work with both Linux and Windows at a small company where Office means what you mean with office. They are all using libreoffice but call it office)

One word. Cloud.

Sharepoint, onedrive, teams. Everything is integrated and collaborating is trivial. You can’t replicate that with open source.

Ok, but surely google docs does that just as well or even better? I have never even heard of sharepoint and onedrive!

I can believe you not hearing about Sharepoint. But not hearing about Onedrive is basically impossible if you have used a Windows machine in the last decade.

Yeah, one may not use it but it's hard to ignore when Office apps suggest you save the document to the cloud as a default. I do avoid it and don't really need any collaboration but I understand that I'm minority. On my home workstation (which is mainly used for video editing) I have only local account so I don't get sucked into more MS services. But at this point you have to actively try to get around the default setup with online account and cloud apps, so it's indeed hard to ignore.

I have never used windows machines for anything but gaming, but I get your point readily. If I had used the windows finder I would have encountered onedrive.

You’re obviously very far from the intended target audience.

Google Docs is not the comparison here. Google Workspace is.

Nope.

It’s akin to being in the AWS ecosystem and having to switch to Oracle. It’s less so MS Office but rather the SAAS and enterprise security stuff in 365

Collaboration

> Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades.

That explains it I suppose.

You are many levels deep in a thread that answers the very question you are asking. From the OP:

> It's not just using a different version of Excel and Word - that's the least of the issues.

It goes on!

"Full disclosure, I haven't used microsoft office in a few decades."

and thats the problem, the fair comparison would be like You replace AWS with hetzner vps

So its a good idea :)

Yeah the problem is hetzner actually good, office alternative is all sucks