We are a startup of almost 40 people now; as the first engineer, I started building up our corp infrastructure and am managing that on the side ever since. We use Entra ID as our central identity provider, manage devices using Intune, use Teams Telephone for PSTN calls, office suite, Sharepoint for file storage, and so on. While we’re at GCP for the business infra, internally we’re pretty entrenched in Microsoft services—which works pretty well so far, I might say.

Recently, however, we hired a RevOps guy that set out to discover optimisation potential, apparently, and today I got a surprise meeting where he demonstrated his big idea of switching from Microsoft to Google Workspace and Slack. He suggested that would be a great idea since everyone hates using Teams, nobody knows where to find files in Sharepoint, many SaaS products only support Google SSO out of the box, and Gemini would be included and we need that to be an AI driven company. Also, new hires only knew Gmail and Drive, but had to be educated on Outlook and Excel, and having everything in the browser would be way superior anyway; Workspace apparently is way better integrated with other tools (although I’m not sure what this means).

Now… before going into engineering, I started in systems administration. I’m in tech since 14 years now. I managed to scale our infrastructure and product from day one, with no breaches, downtime, or major productivity issues. It has been clear for a while that we’ll need someone to take care of internal IT management and support, but this was the first time I even heard of major complaints. I’m usually fairly confident in my skills, but this time I started to doubt myself:

Either I’m not up to date anymore, and too deep into my niche knowledge that I’m sticking to stuff that isn’t relevant any longer—or this is just young people disliking something they aren’t used to and thus not comfortable with. I’m really open to improving things that cause friction, but I can’t help the feeling this is just a young sales team that prefers Slack over Teams and has poorly organised folders in Sharepoint.

From a migration perspective, this is going to be a nightmare; finding replacements, making sure we don’t loose anything, keeping emails and telephones running, third party tools available, and so on. But maybe it’s worth it, and Google Workspace and Slack are so much better that we’re gaining it all in efficiency? Has anyone made such a move, or an opinion on it? Has the tech world simply moved to Google, and I didn’t get the memo?