Surprised there’s no mention of Google Workspace here. I’ve been using Workspace exclusively for probably 5 years now. It’s obviously faster to open, the interface has remained clean and simple, and they’ve steadily closed the feature gap with Word, Excel and PPT.
The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and plotting. If Google would take that product a little more seriously (rather than trying to turn it into a Notion databases clone), they could become a real alternative.
In Corporate America there is an old saying that goes
> "No one ever got fired for buying Microsoft Office".
Basically if you are the head of IT and you use Microsoft Office, the CEO comes to you and complains it is slow, you can say "Well Microsoft makes it slow". The CEO will shrug and move on. But if you instead get rid of microsoft and move the org to Google WOrkspace, then the CEO comes to you and says "Google Sheets doesn't have this one formula that I use" and you tell them that Google doesn't offer it, the CEO fires you for swithcing away from Microsoft Office.
Google Workspace is amazing. But Corporate IT departments just absolutely love paying their Microsoft enterprise subscriptions. So I have to use it for that reason.
Like you said, the office UI is horrible. I can't ever find anything. But in Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets, everything is exactly where I want it. I truly haven't ran into cases where Office products have something significant that Google's workspaces can't. I know there are differences, with office having some more advanced features but I think 99.5% of people don't ever use these advanced features.
Microsoft Office and OpenLibreOffice.Org suck and are slow, but I can't recall a time where they loaded a document part way.
Google Docs is always loading like half a document in a reasonable amount of time and then doing who knows what. It's almost usable for text documents, cause you can usually at least see stuff, even if you can't edit it. It's just trash for spreadsheets; especially when it's like i'll take your input but won't run your formula for a while. I'm not entering the Excel World Championships here, my spreadsheets would calculate 'instantly' on a 486 in excel 5.0 if I had such a setup. If the documents fully load and there's no weirdness, sure it's fine enough; and the multiplayer features are handy, but it's not worth it for single player spreadsheets IMHO.
I haven't had the experience of using Microsoft's Office in a browser, I can only imagine the fun involved there.
My only issue is that it cannot handle lots of data. Both Docs and Sheets have caused limitations here. Docs gets unusably slow. Sheets just wont work.
The thing is, Google's word processor tool (whatever it is called now) is a children's toy, compared to proper word processing software. It doesn't even have proper styles and direct formatting rules the minds of people using it.
The only major gap remaining, IMO, is on Sheets - performance as sheets get large or have lots of formulas, and plotting. If Google would take that product a little more seriously (rather than trying to turn it into a Notion databases clone), they could become a real alternative.