When I think of products underpinning our economy that are ripe for disruption, my mind first jumps to Microsoft and its overwhelming hold on enterprise productivity. Microsoft deserves credit for dramatically accelerating the productivity growth of corporate America by bringing us Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and more, by leveraging the power of computing. They were also the first to identify the massive recurring revenue opportunity in selling Office licenses on a subscription basis, way before the rest of us realized that subscription-based SaaS was the B2B business model of the future.

当我想到支持经济的成熟产品时，已经很容易被颠覆，我首先想到的是微软及其对企业生产力的压倒性支持。 通过利用计算功能为我们带来Word，Excel，PowerPoint等功能，可以大大加快美国公司的生产力增长，因此，Microsoft值得赞扬。 他们也是第一个发现按订阅销售Office许可证的大量经常性收入机会的人，而在我们其余人意识到基于订阅的SaaS是未来的B2B商业模式之前，他们就已经如此。

Having said all that, I am now coming out… as a Microsoft Office hater. I find that most Office application contains a variety of superfluous functionality, strange quirks, and off-putting design choices. Despite my gripes, Microsoft has managed to retain >90% market share for decades now. The reason for that partially derives from its incumbent advantage and the massive switching costs involved to shift away from Office, and specifically in the way that Office is vertically integrated.

说了这么多，我现在作为Microsoft Office仇恨者出来了。 我发现大多数Office应用程序都包含各种多余的功能，奇怪的怪癖和令人讨厌的设计选择。 尽管有我的执着，但数十年来，微软一直设法保持超过90％的市场份额。 这样做的部分原因在于其现有的优势以及从Office转移所涉及的大量转换成本，尤其是Office垂直集成的方式。

Ben Thompson of Stratechery puts it the best in the following example:

在以下示例中，Stratechery的Ben Thompson给出了最好的结论：

“In truth, though, … , the company’s software products have always been designed to work together, particularly in the enterprise. Windows Server came with Active Directory, which undergirded Microsoft Exchange, which users accessed via Outlook on their Windows computers that, of course, ran the rest of the Office suite better than anything else. It was, frankly, a pain in the rear end to try and switch out any of the pieces, which Microsoft leveraged to not only lock in its position, but also drive continual upgrades, which it used to justify subscription pricing years before the rest of Silicon Valley discovered the SaaS business model.”

“实际上，……公司的软件产品一直被设计为可以协同工作，特别是在企业中。 Windows Server附带了Active Directory，该目录在Microsoft Exchange的基础上起了作用，用户可以通过Windows计算机上的Outlook进行访问，当然，运行其余Office套件要比其他任何工具都要好。 坦率地说，尝试切换任何组件在后端很痛苦，Microsoft不仅利用该组件锁定了自己的位置，而且还推动了不断的升级，该升级曾被用来证明订阅定价比其他产品要早几年。硅谷发现了SaaS商业模式。”

Which competitor actually has the capability and scale to counter this dominance? The obvious answer here is Google and G Suite, as you might have guessed from the title of this article.

哪个竞争对手实际上有能力和规模来对抗这种优势？ 正如您可能从本文标题中所猜到的那样，最明显的答案是Google和G Suite。

I admit that, as a user of these tools, I am personally biased towards G Suite — having grown up on G Suite and using it throughout college and internships, my recent transition to Office at my first full-time job was tough, to say the least. Some might find my reaction to this circumstance a bit dramatic, but I think it’s reasonable to feel disappointed at having to settle for what are arguably worse user experiences — there’s a reason why G Suite Apps are considered best-in-breed.

我承认，作为这些工具的用户，我个人对G Suite抱有偏见-在G Suite上长大并在大学和实习期间都使用过它，我最近在第一份全职工作中过渡到Office的经历很难说。至少。 有人可能会觉得我对这种情况的React有些戏剧性，但是我认为对于必须解决可能是最差的用户体验的问题感到失望是有道理的-这就是为什么G Suite Apps被认为是同类产品中的佼佼者。

So why has G Suite failed to be a meaningful challenger to Office? Google recognized very correctly early on that the cloud should be where work is done and stored, because it allows for incredible opportunities in collaboration (working with others in real time) and in the storage and dissemination of information (work product living in the cloud, easily accessible for anyone by simply giving permission). This sort of first-mover advantage should have given G Suite ample latitude to completely disrupt the Office business, though this disruption has not materialized. Some of this may be attributable to the fact that G Suite was not marketed well towards the enterprise segment at first, but even with Google’s increased emphasis on its B2B cloud business in the last few years, G Suite has not seen significant growth. Beyond signing a few marquee clients, like Verizon and Buzzfeed, G Suite has only managed to take at most 1% market share from Microsoft annually (Gartner).

那么，为什么G Suite不能成为Office的有意义的挑战者？ Google很早就很正确地认识到，云应该是工作的完成和存储的地方，因为它为协作(与他人实时合作)以及信息的存储和传播(存在于云中的工作产品，只需给予许可，任何人都可以轻松访问)。 这种先发优势使G Suite有足够的自由度完全破坏Office业务，尽管这种中断尚未实现。 部分原因可能是由于G Suite最初在企业细分市场上的营销不佳，但即使Google在过去几年中越来越重视B2B云业务，G Suite仍未见显着增长。 除了与Verizon和Buzzfeed这样的大客户签约之外，G Suite每年仅从Microsoft获得最多1％的市场份额(Gartner)。

The answer to this conundrum follows from the example above: Office is greater than the sum of Word, Excel, and Outlook, while G Suite didn’t do enough to sell itself as a holistic productivity solution. Additionally, G Suite’s individual app functionality, perhaps because it lives in the cloud, could never live up to the how powerful their Office equivalents were when used offline. Office’s vertical integration in addition to their app’s perceived greater utility locks down clients and is responsible for the giant moat around Office’s market share.

这个难题的答案来自上面的示例：Office大于Word，Excel和Outlook的总和，而G Suite并没有做足够的事情来作为一种整体的生产力解决方案来销售自己。 此外，G Suite的单个应用程序功能(可能是因为它存在于云中)可能永远无法实现脱机使用Office等效功能时的功能。 Office的垂直集成以及他们的应用程序被认为具有更大的实用性，不仅可以锁定客户，而且还可以为Office的市场份额带来巨大的麻烦。

Having established this context, I think that the new G Suite product updates make a great deal of sense in terms of the product’s strategic direction. In case you missed it, here’s the gist of the new features:

建立了这种背景之后，我认为新的G Suite产品更新在产品的战略方向方面意义非凡。 万一您错过了它，以下是这些新功能的要点：

“Virtual meetings, remote collaboration, flexible hours: it’s becoming clear that these new ways of working are here to stay. In my conversations with customers and business leaders since the onset of COVID-19, I’ve seen workplace transformation go from an almost theoretical long-term goal to an urgent priority. Employers and workers want more flexible ways of working, and delivering on this requires the right technology.

“虚拟会议，远程协作，灵活的工作时间：显然，这些新的工作方式将继续存在。 自从COVID-19成立以来，在与客户和业务主管的对话中，我已经看到了工作场所转型从几乎理论上的长期目标转变为当务之急。 雇主和工人想要更灵活的工作方式，而实现这一点需要正确的技术。

…

…

That’s why today, we’re introducing a better home for work. G Suite now intelligently brings together the people, content, and tasks you need to make the most of your time. We’re integrating core tools like video, chat, email, files, and tasks, and making them better together, so that you can more easily stay on top of things, from anywhere.”

因此，今天我们要引入一个更好的工作场所 。 现在，G Suite可以智能地聚集您所需的人员，内容和任务，以充分利用您的时间。 我们正在集成诸如视频，聊天，电子邮件，文件和任务之类的核心工具，并将它们更好地结合在一起，以便您可以随时随地轻松掌握一切。”

Note the explicit mention of “integrating core tools”, which I do think is meant to address the integration problem. However, integration by itself may not be sufficient — it merely takes G Suite to the same level as Office, not further. There is a greater theme at play here, one that derives from the unique strengths of working in the cloud.

请注意明确提到的“集成核心工具”，我认为这是为了解决集成问题。 但是，仅靠集成本身可能还不够—仅使G Suite达到与Office相同的水平，而不是进一步。 这里有一个更大的主题，它源于在云中工作的独特优势。

What may be instructive is to first take a quick look at Slack and its competition against Microsoft and the Teams app specifically. You may remember that, when Teams was first introduced and offered for free as part of Office, it quickly overtook Slack in DAUs, despite being a materially worse service. Unfortunately, that’s how the cookie crumbles against a powerful monopoly — it’s a futile effort trying to be the only unique cog in an otherwise standardized ecosystem.

可能有启发性的是首先快速了解Slack及其与Microsoft和Teams应用程序的竞争。 您可能还记得，当Teams作为Office的一部分被首次引入并免费提供时，尽管服务质量明显下降，但它很快超过了DAU中的Slack。 不幸的是，这就是cookie粉碎成强大的垄断者的方式-试图成为否则标准化的生态系统中唯一的唯一齿轮是徒劳的。

Slack Connect is the response, a new feature that allows users from different organizations to participate in the same channel. Thompson notes that, with Slack Connect, Slack has moved away from direct competition by living in another layer of the work stream: collaboration with third parties. Their ultimate aim is to do that particular subset of work chat well enough to justify a subscription on top of what is already available with Office.

Slack Connect是一种响应，它是一项新功能，它允许来自不同组织的用户参与同一渠道。 汤普森指出，借助Slack Connect，Slack处于工作流程的另一层：与第三方合作，从而摆脱了直接竞争。 他们的最终目标是使特定的工作聊天子集做得足够好，以证明在Office已经可用的基础上进行订阅是合理的。

This move clues us into a striking weakness within the integrated, modular Office strategy: the difficulty of collaborating with outsiders, especially with companies which might have very different Office setups, plugins, or services than yours. In contrast, Slack’s strengths are precisely that it lives in the cloud instead of on the operating system and is designed to abstract away from specific setups instead of custom implementation, providing a fairly uniform experience across different organizations. These strengths make it uniquely able to address the specific work chat use case of collaborating with outsiders.

此举将我们带入集成的模块化Office战略中的一个明显弱点：与外部人员(尤其是与Office设置，插件或服务可能与您的Office完全不同的公司)进行协作的困难。 相比之下，Slack的优势恰恰在于它驻留在云中而不是操作系统中，并且旨在从特定的设置中抽象出来，而不是自定义实现，从而为不同组织提供了相当统一的体验。 这些优势使其能够独特地解决与外部人员协作的特定工作聊天用例。

Slack addresses the narrow use case of collaboration in work chat, but G Suite has a much bigger opportunity by applying this differentiation strategy to its whole service. It’s not enough to match the integration that Office already has, but to fully leverage just how much better-suited the cloud is for collaboration. What Google is now trying to deliver on is not just effective collaboration within each individual application, but rather, collaboration across the entire work stream. I see three potential benefits supporting this emphasis on vertically integrating collaboration in the cloud as the main theme of the G Suite experience:

Slack解决了在工作聊天中协作的狭义用例，但是通过将这种差异化策略应用于其整个服务，G Suite有了更大的机会。 仅仅匹配Office已经具有的集成是不够的，而是充分利用云更适合协作的程度。 Google现在试图提供的不仅是每个单独应用程序中的有效协作，还包括整个工作流中的协作。 我看到三个潜在的好处支持着重强调将协作垂直集成到云中作为G Suite体验的主要主题：

1.深化核心竞争力： (1. Deepening a core competency:)

Microsoft has been slowly and steadily catching up with SharePoint, but it is still fairly unpopular. Google is starting with incredible individual applications, and it has the opportunity to solidify its advantage by abstracting this competency to become a holistic experience.

微软一直在稳步追赶SharePoint，但是仍然不受欢迎。 Google从令人难以置信的个人应用程序开始，它有机会通过抽象化这种能力来巩固自己的优势，从而获得整体体验。

2.利用更好的用户体验： (2. Leveraging a better user experience:)

It bears repeating that G Suite living in the cloud is critical in the quest to dethrone Office. A clear downside to Office is the fact that the software lives on the local operating system, meaning that some companies are still using Office versions from the early 2000s. While that’s an issue that Microsoft has continually worked on addressing, starting with the subscription model and forcing regular upgrades, the fact remains that software versions can be wildly different between companies, bringing with it all of the headaches and issues that that creates.

需要重申的是，生活在云中的G Suite对于淘汰Office至关重要。 Office的明显缺点是该软件可以在本地操作系统上运行，这意味着从2000年代初开始，某些公司仍在使用Office版本。 尽管这是Microsoft一直在努力解决的问题，从订阅模型开始并强制进行定期升级，但事实仍然是，各个公司之间的软件版本可能存在巨大差异，从而带来了所有令人头疼的问题。

G Suite, on the other hand, never needs a user to perform time-consuming updates because all of its services are performed online — Google pushes an update to the backend with zero service disruption, and the user never needs to know when that happens. All users of G Suite are all on the same version of G Suite simultaneously. This has huge benefits for collaboration, the first being that one never has to worry about, for example, a third party spreadsheet that can’t be opened by your version of Excel because the spreadsheet is too old, or too new, or has too many foreign plugins. I imagine that in the case of the large companies, there may even be discrepancies between different departments.

另一方面，G Suite不需要用户执行耗时的更新，因为其所有服务都是在线执行的-Google会将更新推送到后端，而服务中断为零，并且用户永远不需要知道更新的时间。 G Suite的所有用户都同时在同一版本的G Suite上。 这为协作带来了巨大的好处，第一个优点是无需担心，例如，第三方电子表格由于您的Excel版本过旧，过新或过高而无法在您的Excel版本中打开许多外国插件。 我想对于大公司而言，不同部门之间甚至可能存在差异。

3.产生飞轮： (3. Generating a flywheel:)

Enhanced third party collaboration is an opportunity to spread the gospel of G Suite. Picture this: team A from company 1 works with team B from company 2, who insists on working inside G Suite. Team A is blown away by the efficacy of an enhanced G Suite, seeing how it can handle their entire workstream from calendars to task management to docs to email efficiency. If Team A and Team B become long term collaborators, team A is now reminded daily how much better G Suite is. Note that this effect is much weaker if the two teams only used Google Docs, or Sheets, because a good experience within an individual app doesn’t justify changing the entire infrastructure.

增强的第三方协作是传播G Suite福音的机会。 想象一下：公司1的团队A与公司2的团队B合作，后者坚持在G Suite内部工作。 增强的G Suite的功能让团队A惊叹不已，他们看到它如何处理从日历到任务管理再到文档再到电子邮件效率的整个工作流程。 如果A团队和B团队成为长期合作者，那么现在每天都会提醒A团队G Suite有多好。 请注意，如果两个团队仅使用Google Docs或Sheets，则这种影响要弱得多，因为在单个应用程序中获得良好的体验并不能证明更改整个基础架构是合理的。

The issue we run into is that switching from Office to G Suite is a massive ask, but with enough touchpoints between company 1 and other companies that use G Suite, demand could eventually reach a tipping point. Once this happens to enough companies, it’s not hard to see growth explode from there: we’ve seen the amazing flywheels of effective collaboration tools like Zoom and Slack.

我们遇到的问题是，从Office切换到G Suite是一个很大的问题，但是在公司1和其他使用G Suite的公司之间有足够的接触点时，需求最终可能会达到临界点。 一旦这种情况发生在足够多的公司上，就不难看到增长从那里爆炸：我们已经看到了有效的协作工具(如Zoom和Slack)的惊人飞轮。

In summary, up until now, G Suite suffered from two weaknesses: a lack of vertical integration and perceived weakness in raw utility (despite its better design).

总而言之，到目前为止，G Suite存在两个缺点：缺乏垂直集成，并且在原始实用程序方面存在缺点(尽管其设计更好)。

To counteract these weaknesses, Google is betting that better vertical integration based on a laser-sharp focus on easing collaboration both internally and externally can move the needle enough companies to switch from Office to Google, and thus, act as a catalyst of growth for G Suite. They directly address the first weakness, and play up the unique strengths of the cloud to cover-up for the second one. I think that these new feature are all great starting points, but they feel like mostly quality of life adjustments to make existing workflows easier. Google should continue doubling down on more dynamic and core features related to collaborating across G Suite as a whole, and really evolve it into a hub for integrating all different parts of managing daily workflow and project work.

为了弥补这些弱点，Google押注，基于专注于简化内部和外部协作的清晰的垂直整合，可以使足够多的公司从Office转移到Google，从而成为G增长的催化剂套房。 他们直接解决第一个缺点，并发挥云的独特优势来掩盖第二个缺点。 我认为这些新功能都是很好的起点，但是它们感觉主要是生活质量调整，以简化现有工作流程。 Google应该继续将与整个G Suite协作相关的更多动态和核心功能加倍，并将其真正发展为一个集线器，以集成管理日常工作流程和项目工作的所有不同部分。

A final note on this analysis is that, while I focus on collaboration as a winning theme for G Suite, Javier also mentions briefly Smart Compose (sentence prediction when composing emails) as a compelling piece of Gmail. AI capabilities in managing a project’s workflow and augmenting productivity is certainly area of innovation that happens more agilely in the cloud. I also think especially of the numerous bots that live on G Suite, and how they could be better incorporated into selling the service’s AI capabilities. But that is another discussion to be had in the future.

关于此分析的最后一点是，尽管我将协作作为G Suite的获胜主题，但哈维尔还简要提到了Smart Compose(撰写电子邮件时的句子预测)作为Gmail的引人注目的部分。 AI在管理项目工作流程和提高生产力方面的能力无疑是创新的领域，它在云中更加敏捷地发生。 我还特别想到G Suite上存在的众多机器人，以及如何更好地将它们纳入销售该服务的AI功能。 但这是将来要进行的另一次讨论。

For now, I’m eager to whether this is the strategic direction that will allow G Suite to bypass the Office moat that has defeated so many others.

现在，我急切地希望这是否是战略方向，以使G Suite能够绕过击败许多其他竞争对手的Office护城河。