Exclusive Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch.
As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives.
Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital.
Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel.
Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.
Commercial, procurement, and legal teams need robust change tracking for contracts, a feature Google is still perfecting with promised 100 percent compatibility coming in 2026.
"When you do some of the work in Google Workspace and some of the work in Microsoft, there are compatibility issues. Google is working on it and next year we should have a version that will be 100 percent compatible," Jestin told us.
There's also a regulatory hurdle that has "nothing to do with the functionality of Google." Military-classified documents can't be stored in the cloud, forcing those teams to stay on on-premises Microsoft software for the time being.
Some Airbus engineers who spoke to The Reg on condition of anonymity confirmed compatibility issues continue, forcing many to keep using Excel. Airbus still pays Microsoft for licenses, but declined to specify costs or scale. Again, Google is trying to overcome this challenge.
Jestin praised Google for agreeing to work on its software to improve interoperability and the features in its Workspace wares.
"Definitely having bigger files, having more functionality and more functions inside Google Sheets, is something they want to have, and the traceability is something that they want to improve globally."
Airbus is a big logo for Google to win and keeping hold of that relationship is something execs at Mountain View see as vital given its challenger status compared to Microsoft's massive installed base.
The Register has asked Google to comment. ®
Source: The register