Imo, as long as companies are paying for E3 licenses, they won't pay for another solution. And they'll be paying Microsoft for licenses as long as they have Active Directory, right? Seems like the whole Microsoft ecosystem is built on AD (and probably Excel too)

Yes, AD is the value proposition. Your employees can get cloud-synced, multi-user real-time editing of documents. This is what kills the "but my Linux app can do it for free."

It runs on-premise, has all kinds of certificates and has a history of half a cenutry (give or take.) That kills Google Docs.

It's cross-paltform, killing whatever Apple thinks it has.

Too many people think Word is a text editor. I'd use Notepad++ if it had full AD integration. But it doesnt.

> And they'll be paying Microsoft for licenses as long as they have Active Directory, right?

They'll be paying long beyond on-prem AD as well. EntraID is becoming the new identity system. If you're already on E3/E5, you might as well make use of it, and making most use of it means being stuck in the whole Microsoft ecosystem.

Why bother looking for alternatives, even if one particular product might be better, when Microsoft gives you literally everything at at least a mediocre level, for one price and pre-integrated.

If you keep linking enough problematic options in an "all or nothing" package, at some point people flip to the other choice you are giving them.

It's looking like Windows will be more of an issue here than anything in Office. But either way they can only push people so far.

Mac OS X Server has Open Directory, and there were others