Modern productivity workflows often revolve around getting your work done within the conglomerate of some big-tech company's ecosystem. You'll often be forced into using it if your company does, but for personal use, you have more control over where you store your data and collect your ideas. Google is one of the most pervasive companies in this regard, housing personal email, web browsing, document editing, photo storage, and not to mention the Android ecosystem. I use Google's products in many facets of my personal life, and once I realized just how tight their grip was on such a big portion of my online activity, I wanted to make a concerted attempt to de-Google my life.

Here's the catch: I didn't want to self-host, and I still needed access to cloud storage, synced productivity apps, and a decent native email client. I wanted the transition to be seamless, so I made a lateral move to another tech giant in Microsoft.

Why Microsoft?

Is there really any difference?

Moving from Google's ecosystem to Microsoft's might seem insignificant, but there are some key differences between the two of them. Office as a whole is more comprehensive as a productivity platform over Google's Docs, Sheets and Slides, and while Microsoft is starting to drift further into an ad-driven model, they're still mostly subscription-based. However, swapping over would mean ditching my Google One subscription, which includes 100 GB of cloud storage.

Microsoft's 365 Basic subscription does the same thing at a similar price point; offering 100 GB of storage along with your standard Outlook email and other basic essentials. While I would like to completely immerse myself in the ecosystem by also swapping to Outlook, all of my daily emailing runs through a Gmail account, so that's the only thing I'll have to stick with Google for.

One of the biggest differences is the added cost for access to the Office suite. While it's slightly more comprehensive in what it offers, I'm not crazy about having to pay extra for it, but having standalone apps for offline work is a bonus.

What I liked about the transition

There wasn't really much of a difference functionally

For my day-to-day personal work, I didn't feel like there was much of a difference in the functionality of the two ecosystems. In terms of migrating my cloud storage over, that was easy enough. Actually using OneDrive on my main desktop PC instead of doing everything I could to remove it was actually refreshing. It was responsive and well-integrated, although the web-based experience felt a bit less polished compared to Google Drive. Minimal complaints from me here.

Productivity was also a simple swap, with the Office suite not doing a lot to justify the extra cost. It was nice being able to use a fully-fledged app offline on a recent flight, but the Office experience is pretty close to what Google offers, with some niche differences. I will admit though, OneNote is much more comprehensive than Google Keep in terms of a note-taking application. OneNote doesn't have as good integration with the rest of Office, but Keep has an organization structure that is pretty basic in comparison. Full disclosure: I've never actually used Keep, as my main notes app is Notion, but when exploring both OneNote and Keep for this article, I can say for sure that I would prefer OneNote by a mile.

In addition to the productivity suite, I also switched from Chrome to Edge, which was probably the most pleasantly surprising swap. Chrome and Edge are similar in their construction, both being Chromium-based, but Edge felt much lighter. I didn't like how long it took to de-bloat, but once it was all setup, I preferred Edge to standard Chrome.

What I didn't like

And why I'll probably keep looking for another solution

Even though I didn't find anything reprehensible about the swap to Microsoft, at the end of the day, I was just paying more to access similar features, with maybe a little bit more privacy. Microsoft is still a tech giant, and while both they and Google have their businesses modeled on convenience and functionality everywhere, the privacy cost is still high. I knew that coming into this, and while the revenue models might be somewhat different, you'll only have true privacy (and cost savings) if you self-host. You lose a lot of convenience, especially at the start, but at least you're in control of every aspect of how you de-Google or even de-Microsoft.

It's all about preferences

At the end of the day, the differences between Google and Microsoft that matter to the average user come down to the user experience. The productivity app stack, ecosystem integrations, email clients and the actual day-to-day use of these things are mostly the same. Privacy is a valid concern when working within the walled garden of either ecosystem, so if you're using that as a potential motivation to switch, I would consider looking elsewhere.