Transcription
So, it's time to get serious about email, and you're stuck between Office 365 and Google's Workspace ecosystem. Well, in this video, I'm going to take you through how to make a decision between the two.
I've advised literally tens of thousands of small business owners in over 30 countries all over the world, and I've been doing this for a long time—I'm embarrassed to admit almost about 20 years. Let me take you through how to choose between these two great ecosystems for small business and which one is right for you.
Now, I'm going to admit up front, we are a Google partner. We primarily work with Google Workspace. We do also do some work with Office 365 and Microsoft for our customers as well, but most of our business and most of our channel is focused on the Google ecosystem. So, you're getting a pretty biased viewpoint from me here.
But I also previously was a small business owner. We're a medium-sized business now, but I've got the experience of being a small business owner and working with these tools day-to-day. I can tell you from lived experience why I like the Google ecosystem, but I'm going to try and keep this as fairly balanced as possible so you can make an informed decision on which one is going to be the right one for you.
Before we dive in, let's get through a basic rundown of what's actually included in each one of these ecosystems.
Now, Google Workspace has your Google Document formats—that's what most people know them for. If you've used a Gmail address, you know what these look like: Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides if you want to do slide presentations. You've even got Google Forms in there as well, and that's the document suite.
But Workspace has lots of other things as well. You've got a chat program; it's called Google Chat. It lives within Gmail, but think of it like your Googled version of Slack. You also have Google Meet, which is the Googled version of Zoom. You've got online meetings that happen in the browser, on your mobile phone, wherever you are, and can connect you and your team.
Now, Google Drive is where you store all of your files, and that synchronizes down to your computer and is available on every one of your devices. Your Google Drive stores both your Google Documents, your Google format documents, but you can store anything else you want in there as well—so PDFs, Microsoft documents, video files, audio files—all of that lives inside of Google Drive.
Now, Google also has another interesting feature inside Workspace called Google Sites, which not many people know about. But it's an internet product; you can use it to build a public website, but it's really best for intranets because it's pretty basic. The Google Sites is something that we see a lot of our small business customers using to build an online SOP for your manuals, for your how-tos, for everything you need to document in the business. Google Sites is a great option for that, and we've got other videos on the channel covering Sites.
Next up is 365, and you're going to have the basics that you're probably used to: Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint. They are the stable mates for nearly 30, maybe even 40 years now—a long time. You also have newer features that have been built into Office 365, which is the ability to chat, the ability to make calls. You've got video calls as well, and this is through their service called Microsoft Teams.
Now, Google also introduced OneDrive, which is your place to store all your files. Think of that as the equivalent to Google Drive. You can put any kind of file that you like inside of OneDrive. You can't put a Google Doc in there because they live on the web in the browser, but you can put Microsoft documents, obviously. You can put your video files, your, I don't know, Adobe files if you're working with creative design elements—all of that can live inside of OneDrive, and it is just like Google, available on the web and also available on your mobile devices.
Now, SharePoint is Microsoft's version of Google Sites. It is an online intranet, but let me tell you, it is way more advanced than Google Sites. SharePoint can be turned into a workflow and productivity system, and there are SharePoint consultants that exist who will help you to actually build those workflows and build deep customizations into SharePoint.
It's not something that I recommend small business owners have a go at themselves, but the features are there. What small business owners can do, though, is to set up a basic SharePoint site with your systems, processes, SOPs, and how-tos, just like you would with Google Sites. I think this is important for any small business to do—to document your systems and procedures and processes. So, when you hire a new person, you can give them a library of how to do things in your business so they're not stuck, and you're not constantly retraining people on the same things.
So, let's talk about the most important differences between these two ecosystems. People often ask me, "Which one should I use?" Really, the question is which collection of features and collection of apps do you like best? Like choosing between a Windows computer and a Mac, it's about the ecosystem.
With the Windows machine, you get additional customization. There are certain apps that might run on Windows that don't run on a Mac. But with a Mac, you can pair your AirPods to your computer, and you can AirDrop files between your phone and your computer with one button. This is an ecosystem play, like many things are these days, and that's what it's really going to come down to.
Google Workspace really shines when it comes to collaboration. What I mean by that is being able to edit, comment, and share in real time. Google's online tools that run in the browser have all been designed around working with multiple people and getting work done without having to email files or synchronize files back and forth.
Now, the online interface working with a document is simpler when compared to the equivalent of a Microsoft document. You open up a Google Doc, and you're not going to have every single button, bell, whistle, and feature that you'll have in the Microsoft world. But I found in my experience over decades of working with the Google ecosystem that I'm able to get everything done that I need to get done.
Now, the one that usually trips people up is Excel because power users of spreadsheets will often find that there are things that they just can't do in Google Sheets, and they want to go back to Excel. For now, Google has been steadily adding new features over the years to make Google Sheets really compelling. I'm pretty impressed that they now have pivot tables; they've got AI-based insights that are built right into their spreadsheets.
There's a lot of real-time data that you can pull in off the web, and it really just makes that compelling. If you have a spreadsheet with 10,000 rows, sure, it's still going to perform better when you're working in Excel, which runs natively on your computer rather than in the web. But overall, I'd say that in 90% of cases, Google Sheets are able to do what you could do in the Microsoft world.
If you're someone who's considering making the switch, once you switch to working online in real time, everything changes. The way that businesses used to work was someone would work on a file, and then they'd email it or drop it in a Dropbox and wait for the other person to work on it, and then they'd send it back. But inevitably, you end up with conflicted copies, or you're working on the wrong version, and things can turn into a bit of a mess.
Now, Microsoft does have online versions of their document tools, but they're not really great, and they're missing out on a lot of the features that you find on the desktop equivalents. For businesses that are in the Microsoft world, you'll find that you are unsure of which one to use. You'll probably default to the desktop ones, and then you end up in a situation where collaboration is reduced.
Once you're in a meeting, opening up a Google Document and editing cells on a spreadsheet or words on a document in real time with your colleagues, you'll never want to go back to the old way of working. When we're rushing to put together last-minute changes to a presentation for our company meeting that happens monthly or a webinar that we want to deliver to our customers, we often find that three or four, or sometimes even ten people are working on a slide deck at the same time.
That's pretty cool because we can all get work done together and collaboratively when otherwise we would have to wait for everyone to take their turn working on the document. It's a different way of working; it is a preference for me. It doesn't suit everyone, but that's one of the best advantages of working with Google.
Now, with 365, Microsoft is really focusing on their chat, their video conferencing, and their file sharing in their Teams collaboration platform. Now, Teams is the way of basically staying in touch with your team members. You've got your status, you've got the ability to obviously post messages and keep in touch with your team, but Microsoft really wants you to feel like you're not in a different room, no matter where you are in the world. To be honest, they've done a pretty good job of this.
The real advantages with Microsoft, when it comes to the document collaboration suite, is the power of the actual tools. Excel is unbeatable when it comes to data analysis for large sets of data, or if you want to start adding macros or automations or, you know, complex workflows relying on a spreadsheet. Well, Microsoft is going to be the way to go with that.
If you want to produce a document and publish it, you know, Google Docs is really basic, and it shows. You can feel when something's been made in Google Docs because you know you're not able to put in background pictures with a gradient and make things look like a book or like a presentation. You're just really stuck with the Googled way of doing things, whereas with Microsoft, Microsoft Word is a powerful document publisher.
Now, they used to have an app called Publisher, which I don't know if it still exists anymore, but a lot of that thinking went into Microsoft Word over the last 10 years, meaning that it's a pretty darn impressive way to publish documents now. PowerPoint also does have some advanced features, but I think it's pretty par for the course with Google Slides. But Excel and Word definitely shine.
Now, all of this is to say that sure, you may be making your decision on ecosystem based on the document processor that you want to work with on a day-to-day basis. But Google has a silver bullet here, and that is that if you really want to work with a Word doc or an Excel document for a particular file or a particular client or a particular project, you can do that and store it in Google Drive. It gives you the best of both worlds.
Now, you do have to pay for a license for that. Google can edit Microsoft documents inside of Google Drive, but that's only a basic editor. So, you would have to pay for an extra license for anyone in your business who still wants to use Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and save their files into Drive.
But importantly, this can't be done the other way around. If you're a Microsoft business and you've chosen that as the ecosystem, you can't then put your Google Docs into your OneDrive. You're going to have to leave them in Google Drive, and most people end up using a Gmail account. That's not really great for security in a small business.
So, my preference is if you want to play the field and do a little bit of both, that you use Google as your ecosystem and you just pay for an Office license for those people who still want to use those documents.
Now, I can't mention Google versus Microsoft without covering email because so much of what we do every day relies on communication, and unfortunately, we're still stuck with email for a lot of that. Now, Outlook is an absolute beast. You can do tasks; there are all kinds of customizations that you can make to it, and it turns into a productivity system when you're sharing calendars with your team members.
I've got no issue with how Outlook works apart from the fact that you've got to download it to your computer. When you have a large mailbox over very long periods of time, you end up with tens or even hundreds of thousands of emails in your mailbox, and that starts to slow down Outlook quite significantly.
We've all seen search having to reindex and running slowly, and when you open it on your mobile phone, it's got to think a little bit harder about accessing your email. Whereas with Gmail, because it runs in the browser, all of the hard thinking is being done by Google's supercomputers. It means that when you run a search, even if I want to search for an email from 10 or 15 years ago, it's instantly going to bring that email up for me because Google's doing all the hard work. My local computer doesn't have to look through an email database to find those emails itself.
Now, that means that Google's probably going to be more efficient to work with. People worry about, "Oh, if I use Gmail in Google Workspace, will people know? If I send them a calendar invite from Google Calendar, will they know? Will it look unprofessional?" No, email calendar invites are open standards, and whether you send it from Outlook or from Gmail, it's going to arrive exactly the same in the person's recipient mailbox. So, you've got no issue with what platform you choose to use.
I would also say that using Gmail is going to make your life a little easier. Things like rules, which are called filters on your email, if you choose to filter certain emails out of your inbox and put them in a separate mailbox or folder when they arrive, well, that can all happen on the cloud when Google is actually receiving your email.
Rather than in Outlook, the rules only run after your mail has been downloaded to your computer. So, for a number of reasons, I like using Gmail. There's one downside, though, where Microsoft does take the cake, and that is offline access.
Now, when you use Gmail, you do have offline mode available, but you only get the last 90 days of email. So, if you're the kind of person who wants to jump on a plane and reply to an email from a year ago, okay, maybe Outlook is a better idea in that case. But again, Google has a silver bullet. If you really, really, really wanted to—and I don't recommend this, nor do I see many customers doing this—but you can connect your Gmail account or your Google Workspace mail account into Outlook as a mail source, and it will download a copy of your emails.
If you want the last year of email, you've got the last year of email. I wouldn't recommend it, but the option's there just in case you want it. Now, I touched on offline access, and you know, whether you're using Drive or OneDrive, you can access your documents offline because they're synchronized down to your computer. That's all pretty easy.
Now, if you're working on a Google Doc, you can also access that offline as long as you're using the Chrome browser. It'll synchronize your Google Docs offline; you can make edits to them, and when you connect, it'll synchronize those edits back to the web.
But what about things like security? What about protecting your account? Well, thankfully, both ecosystems do a great job of this. Both support two-factor authentication, and it's typically enabled by default for accounts. So, when you sign in, you'll be prompted to add a mobile phone or an authentication app to protect your account.
Now, I like to lock this down for every single business by enforcing it as a policy, and you can do that with both Microsoft and with Google to make sure every one of your team members' accounts are properly protected. Both ecosystems also have pretty great mobile apps. The Outlook app is great; the Gmail app is great. Personally, I like the search better on Gmail because I think it performs better.
But apart from that, you're going to get a pretty consistent experience across them. There is one thing that Google does have as an advantage, which is if you're working between Macs and Windows machines across your business, you're going to get a more consistent experience because Google's tools all run in the web and in the browser.
It means that as long as you've got a compatible web browser, you're going to get exactly the same experience of the app. Whereas if you're switching from a Windows machine to a Mac machine, you're going to use the same file formats in a Word document or an Excel document, but you're potentially going to see different buttons in different places. The app is going to look different.
It's just because developing a local desktop-based application for Windows and Mac are two different things. You're roughly going to get the same set of features, but you're not going to get the same experience. This outlines one of the real downsides of choosing the Microsoft ecosystem over Google.
You see, because Google's all in the browser, they only have to maintain one version of their app. Whereas with Microsoft, because they're delivering apps down to multiple operating systems and multiple devices, they've got all kinds of compatibility that they need to manage. Every time they deploy a new version of their app, one of their engineers might accidentally create a bug for Mac OS, and they'll deploy the application there, and then they have to go and fix that while still worrying about how does the application work on Windows, how does the application work on Linux.
That creates levels of complication for the Microsoft engineers and the business to be able to support their application suite. Now, Google just pretty much has one app to deliver, and that is the web app. Now, yes, they've got to make sure it's compatible in different browsers, but for the most part, Google can just focus on building their app for the web.
What that means is they're able to iterate much faster. You would know that major revisions to Microsoft Office happen typically every 12 to 18 months, but with Google, they release a new revision which has substantial features at least every six weeks, and they're constantly adding new features to these apps all the time.
We cover these on our channel when they release their new updates every month, and we try to cover the best ones for small business owners. But Google's constantly evolving their tools at a much faster pace than Microsoft.
Now, feature for feature, these days, the ecosystems are pretty similar. For a long time, Google was way ahead in collaboration, but Microsoft has done a tremendous job of catching up. I've got to say, nowadays, feature for feature, each of these ecosystems are pretty similar.
But you're probably going to find yourself gravitated towards one of them for the style of working. Gmail is really familiar to Millennials, and if you've got either a millennial workforce or you are a Gen X or Millennial yourself running a business, you're going to find you're probably going to like the Google ecosystem more because you're used to it.
It's easy; the buttons are simpler; there are fewer options. And considering it runs on the web, we're all pretty much digital cloud natives now, meaning that we're used to going to the web to get our work done. Having Gmail open in just another browser tab with all the other browser tabs that you're working with on a typical day means that it's pretty simple to flick right over to your Google tools and then come back.
Google is also well known for their integrations, and because everything is online, it's easier for third-party developers to build integrations that will work right across the Google ecosystem. Now, Microsoft has the advantage of if you have a legacy application, a legacy database, if you're a law firm and you want to do complex revisions inside of a document, well, in that case, okay, the Microsoft ecosystem might make sense to you.
If you're a financial planner and you've got a document collaboration suite that synchronizes to Outlook, it might make sense that you stick with the Microsoft ecosystem for that particular integration. But for many business owners, particularly those who have grown up as cloud natives, if you're using Xero.com for your accounting package, which is online and in the browser, and your job management system is online and in the browser, or maybe you're an e-commerce store and you're just using Shopify to sell your goods or your services or your products, well, all of that can be done in the web.
So, if everything else is happening in the web, why would you go to a desktop-based application like Microsoft? I said at the start of this video I was going to try and remain as balanced as possible, but I use the analogy often that Google is like a Tesla to Microsoft's gasoline car.
A typical gasoline car has so many moving parts—a heating, a cooling, an electrical system—just all these moving pieces that need to work together for the car to run. An electric vehicle just has a couple of components: a couple of electric motors, a big battery, some computer screens, and four wheels. It's just a simpler way of doing things, and my preference is simple over everything else.
For many decades now, everyone's been using Gmail to do their university assignments, to work on their personal projects over the weekend, and use basically everything we need to use for our digital life. That is an ecosystem that is deeply embedded in your emerging employees. If you're hiring young talent, for that, it makes the decision between these two obvious, at least for me.
If you're worried about the differences in price, honestly, these days, they're pretty much equivalent between the two ecosystems. Outside of using a Windows machine versus a Mac machine, and Outlook maybe having a couple of things that work a little bit better on Windows, both of these ecosystems work pretty good across your different operating systems.
If you need help deciding between the two or you want to migrate from Microsoft to the Google ecosystem or even back the other way, we offer migration services through our consulting company, and we're available to customers all around the world. Click the link below to get started with our team, and if you'd like to learn more about the Google ecosystem, be sure to subscribe to the channel.