Office 365 vs. G Suite – The Battle for Productivity Intensifies

Microsoft’s Office 365 is the present leader, but Google responds with G Suite and wins some important customers. Both cloud-based productivity suites are improving their feature sets, offering new apps for IT managers.

Communication approaches

Microsoft and Google approach quite different strategies and Adam Preset, Gartner’s research director, thinks that both ways of handling issues such as communication and collaboration will work perfectly. It all depends on the context, obviously.

The two suites should focus mostly on an open platform, because it’s in their best interest, according to senior analyst at 451 Research, Castanon-Martinez.

Microsoft is leading for now

Unlike Google who is a newcomer in this whole enterprise game, Microsoft has marked its place for decades. So, the fact that Microsoft is the leader shouldn’t come as a surprise. This reflects mostly in customer numbers that have been reported by the companies. Microsoft’s Office 365 is being currently used by 85 million people every month, and G Suite cannot brag much with only 3 million paying business customers. As you can see, Office 365 is the leader of enterprise collaboration and also in terms of productivity,  magnitude and orders.

Tools

The prevailing value resides in the suites’ set of comprehensive tools they both offer to their customers. Microsoft and Google have a vast palette of apps, but the challenge is ensuring that the connection between apps can efficiently deliver value to end users.

Future challenges

As they develop expanding and evolving sets of apps this year, Microsoft and Google will both face some new and distinct challenges. Google still has to prove itself as being valuable in the enterprise space, having to develop a larger partner network and to build a strong image as an enterprise software dealer.

On the other hand, Microsoft needs to consolidate its productivity tools under one interface. It also has to deal with perceptions revolving around Office 365 such as the fact that it might be not functional enough or that it’s too bloated.