A clash of universes | “Marvel vs DC” by Teo Gonzalez Every few months I’ll end up in a classic product debate: Hey! Which do you think is better? Microsoft Office or Google Docs . The thoughts below aren’t about the debate per se but some facets of the industry surrounding it . Some broad themes we’ll cover — what triggers these debates, how product teams think and what systemic incentives drive them.

Two notes. First, I’m fully aware that the actual name for Google’s productivity tools is “G-suite”, but most people I know refer to the whole set of tools as “Google Docs”, so I’m going to stick with that . Second, I call this the Office vs Google Docs comparison, but I primarily look at Word & Google Docs, the word processors which I use most. You can find parallel comparisons for other types of product.

Bye objectivity, hello Politics

Whenever this question pops up, an outpouring of passionate opinions and heated conversations will spring forth. There are clear camps on this topic with zealots on both sides . These products are so deeply embedded in the workplace with years of built-up muscle memory and blind spots, that it is difficult for most people to see these products objectively . The discussion veers like a religious or political debate, where “after long and careful consideration” people conclude that their side is the best!

Arguments for illustrative purposes below, any resemblance to reality is accidental.

The Microsoft Office camp:

Bruh, Office has the most powerful features. No question. Microsoft invented this shit. Google docs lacks good formatting options and don’t even get me started on Pivot tables . Pivot tables and VLOOKUP ARE MY LIFE. And I heard XLOOKUP just came out #Excited. Btw, with Office 365 everything is the cloud with all that commenting thingy, so full collaboration support . Amaze.

The Google Docs camp:

Dude. Google Docs is the slickest. It is the dope for collaboration. Modern productivity is about #collaboration. The commenting and editing experiences are seamless, elegant AND quick . Office collaboration is a clusterfuck. Google Docs works super on mobile too. YOU GUYS STILL HAVE A SAVE BUTTON. LAME. Btw, the missing features are things people don’t use anyway, that’s why Office is so frickin bloated.

I’ve memorialised this battle in art below.

“Our Great Product”, my remix of “Our Blessed Homeland” by Tom Gauld

I had this debate again recently, then a few hours later I opened Dropbox Paper and was blown away by it. For me, as a sucker for elegant products, it felt way better than both . I had given it a shot earlier but never made the switch, but now I did. The more important realisation was that I needed new friends this debate had lost sight of the bigger picture.

Distribution pre-empts evaluation

This conversation also brings to the fore the power of distribution. We don’t use the best tools, we use the available ones. Then, we rationalise why the tool we’ve ended up with is actually the best and defend it . That pattern doesn’t fit everybody of course. You might be a writer who needs to manage story outlines and end up finding Ulysses . You might be a programmer who needs syntax highlighting and discover Atom (amongst many others). Or you might just be a curious tech nerd wondering what else is out there . These are rarer events where an end user conducts an evaluation and makes a conscious choice. Most of the time, you just roll with the organisation default or a social norm . The reason we are talking about these two products in particular is because they enjoy a huge distribution advantage over others and are good enough for most people.

Girardian conflict

In my opinion, the Office and G-Suite are indistinguishable in a ” squint test ” — an exercise where designers literally squint their eyes to lose focus and see only the broad outlines of a design, intentionally ignoring the details an expert would notice but a average user won’t.

Counter to what you’d expect, small differences trigger bigger fights. If the differences are huge, the objects are seen as incomparable resulting in lesser conflict . At least, that’s how the theory of Girardian conflict goes. This clearly plays out when discussing Microsoft Office vs Google Docs. Somehow IAwriter or the legions of really different tools will never be mentioned, but minor differences between Office & Docs will discussed heavily.

If you’ve never heard of the philosopher Rene Girard, head over to this excellent intro to his work by Alex Danco.

Faster horses

Every time a new tool comes along, it is trapped in the frame of the old tool. Every idea about what to do with the new tool comes from the old tool. Then there is sheer inertia, w e make the new tool fit our existing ways from the old too; only over time do we change our habits and fully embrace the powers of the new tool.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses” — Henry Ford¹ If you asked people in 1983, when Microsoft Word was created, what they wanted to do with their word processors; a lot of their thoughts would centre around printing and publishing. Their objects of comparison were typewriters and printed pages . Google Docs came on the scene much later in 2006, yet maybe not late enough to think radically different. It’s not just Google Docs, you can look at any of the competing productivity suites like OpenOffice, Apple iWork and WPS Office; they don’t look too different . From the formatting oriented feature sets to the layout of core typing area which resembles a piece of paper , these tools constantly give off that 80s desktop-publishing smell.

The new era of work is apparently all about collaboration. News Flash: Work was always about collaboration. Just that the invisible and unrecorded physical communication in the form of taps on the shoulders, desk chats and quick meetings is being been replaced by email, online chats and in-product comments . Our tools and toolmakers are finally leaving the notion of digital paper behind. Along the way, we are asking some interesting questions that lead us to new products and experiences.

• Can I deliver a more compelling knowledge creation & sharing experience if I let go of the notion of paper? That’s the ethos behind Dropbox Paper and Quip.
• Communication and consensus around documents can be done online now. How can I make that a core part of the tool? drives Google Docs, Figma, and many more tools today.
• Why do you need 3 different software productivity tools, why can’t this be one? is the central question in Coda, Quip and (partially) Notion.
• What if I reinvented the Excel spreadsheet for the 21st century while high on LSD? The only good explanation for Airtable.

Only now have we begun to leave our old frame and inertia behind.

The chase of the marginal

In general, the term Enterprise product was an euphemism for bad user experience, with enterprise products notorious for having airplane cockpit-like interfaces loaded with a gazillion features. That feature bloat is understandable because the marginal gain from an additional contract sale is much higher than the marginal loss from a worse user experience . Said otherwise, shitty user experience wasn’t a factor in sales conversations and consequently didn’t significantly impact sales. The economic buyer aka the procurement manager would buy software the way you might buy cement — by checking things off a list . Heck! The people who buy cement might at least inspect a sack or two, I’m not sure that always happens with the Enterprise CRM purchases. To the economic buyer, it mattered less if the software didn’t feel very intuitive to use, it mattered more that it met all the company requirements without slamming the budget.

Microsoft has been chasing the marginal Enterprise customer for decades now. And you might reflexively say that is why their interface is packed with features . You’ll probably be right. We can see this play out in the consumer space too. Facebook keeps chasing the marginal user engagement feature to keep you coming back and spending more time . So they’ve got feed, groups, chats, games, events, stories, marketplace, fundraisers, etc., and look how their interface has drifted.

The rise of design

The last 15 years have changed the game entirely. The explosion of smartphones and the internet meant a big chunk of humanity has paid for computing products and is mentally immersed in computing interfaces . Consumer internet-led experiences grew huge and naturally the consumer experience improved, wildly . We know shitty software when we see it. The user experience was bad is an actual reason people uninstall apps and stop using websites . The new buying process is akin to choosing a company car; “Our employees can’t be driven around in a Fiat, lets get a Mercedes” becomes “Our employees can’t be seen using Windows, lets get them Macbooks”. Software is truly eating the world, because today it has absorbed vanity .

Enterprise UX

Here’s another problem, Enterprise is not a user but collection of users. So unless you build multiple products (which is expensive), your product will be an amalgamation that caters to multiple user personas and not a laser focused tool . Then you have to add nested-menus, toolbars and ribbons to bury that complexity.

Adobe Photoshop probably serves as the best example of multi-pronged attempts to rein in this complexity

• Wholesale launching of a new product —  Photoshop vs Photoshop Elements- Pre-set workspace options —Painting, Photography, Typography, etc.- Completely configurable UI — The above presets are just possible setups , you completely move around things in Photoshop to get the exact setup you want.

That’s a lot of power for the multiple power users who use Photoshop.

The illusion of untested virtuousness

There’s a common notion that celebrities are immoral people. You might hear of their drug abuses, their affairs, their extravagant lifestyles and shudder. “How can they be like this? I would do never do that”. Virtuousness is easy when temptations are few . Showered with unfathomable amounts of fame, money and attention; celebrities do exactly what an average person who isn’t a desire-less zen Buddhist would do — they slip up somewhere & fall prey to temptation.

What does this have to with product management?

It’s easy to say “ we’re very focused on a small feature set ” when the truth is that you don’t really have that that many customers who are badgering you for more features. Rarer is the case, when this behaviour stems from a philosophy or an intentional thought process that is guarded well.

There is a bi-directional causality to feature bloat.

• Supporting more use cases is a way to get more users
• Getting more users forces you to support more use cases The former is more understandable, it’s a miniature horizontal integration. The latter is more interesting. If you end up with lots of users, they will solve corners cases in ugly ways and complain about it, forcing you to eventually catch up solve those use cases elegantly.

Aligned incentives implies convergence

Here’s the bad news for both camps in the Office vs G-Suite debate — the incentives for G-Suite and Microsoft Office are aligned in the same direction and the products will converge over time. Lets get there slowly.

G-Suite, like a lot of Google products was birthed from the insane economic and human capital that Google accumulated. Google invested heavily into literally inventing the capabilities of the modern web as we know it . Google Docs started with the purest of intentions; showcasing the web and losing money. Google’s “strategy” was to target SMBs. Eventually growing tired of the losing money part, Google did a full 180° turn and started doing what Microsoft had been doing for decades — Selling software to giant enterprises . Enterprises who are fewer in number, easier to extract $ from and less volatile as entities. The fooling around of youth was over, it was time to settle down with an acche gharaane ka ladka, jo tumhaara khyaal rakhega. G-Suite, just like Microsoft Office, is now aimed squarely towards Enterprises . Given this, it is inevitable that their products will converge. Whatever collaboration features Word is missing, it will add. Whatever advanced features Google Docs doesn’t have, it will add . The incentive for both these companies is to build marginal features that drive marginal contract sales, which includes the pressure to not lose sales to competition from missing features . Both will become power user tools. Given the incentives, Google won’t stick its design neck out when a slightly worse user experience will brings in more $$$, and there’s always the option of throwing in some toolbars and ribbons! The convergence won’t be 100% of course, path dependence and initial customer base constrain that.

The Dropbox contra case

Dropbox and Dropbox Paper stand out in terms of design. The founding legend of Dropbox goes something like this— everyone told Drew Houston ‘Hey! There are dozens of these’ file sync thingies, why build another one?’ and he said “ Sure, but do you actually use any of them?”. In case you’re wondering, the answer is no , most of those competing tools were super-complicated . That ethos of pristine usability defines Dropbox. Dropbox sells ease and indexes heavily on design. But a cool philosophy can go haywire when faced with growth pressures and incentives . Dropbox shines there too.

First, Dropbox doesn’t acquire the customers the traditional sales way, “90% of its revenue coming from individuals and businesses signing up for Dropbox plans on their own”². Second, they sell to comparatively tiny teams — “most of Dropbox’s business customers are small teams of 3 or more people with a dash of larger implementations ”³ . In summation, “It’s a consumer software company with a side hustle” ⁴ (of enterprise sales). They’ve used the internet as a sales channel to reach out to millions of individuals and small businesses, akin to Netflix . So they’ve saved themselves from the protracted negotiations that typically come with selling software to businesses. This direct-to-consumer sales approach is the real insurance against future feature bloat. Thanks for reading! Don’t hold back your praise or criticism, let it be seen in the comments . For more unwanted commentary, follow @dalanMendonca.

Thanks to BD, Shyam Sunder, Deepika BLR, Devina Sharma & Ghaus Rabbani for initial fodder and reviewing drafts. [1] Side-note: It cannot be confirmed that Henry Ford ever said that line. Yet, this quote is oft-cited in the marketing circles . I have no qualms using it either, never let the facts come in the way of a good story.

[2] Dropbox’s Jump Shows How Misunderstood Tech Stories Can Create Opportunities — The Street [3] [Dropbox and Box were never competitors — Tech

Crunch](https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/23/dropbox-and-box-were-never-competitors/) [4] We’ve Been Thinking About Dropbox All Wrong — Bloomberg Opinion