The situation almost always unfolds the same way. A company adopts Google Workspace, usually starting with email: it is inexpensive, quick to set up, and everyone knows how to use Gmail. But then quotes are built in Excel, contracts in Word, and the sales rep keeps a file with ten years of history inside it. Nobody decided to run two platforms at once, the company simply drifted there one step at a time.
It works, until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, the problem doesn’t show up as a bad strategic decision, but as a series of small daily annoyances that nobody has budgeted for.
The catch you discover too late: real-time co-editing
It is the feature everyone takes for granted in 2026: two people open the same file and work on it together. Here the two official documentations say very specific things, and it is worth reading them side by side.
Microsoft is explicit: co-authoring requires the file to be saved on OneDrive, OneDrive for Business or a SharePoint Online library. It is not a recommendation, it is a requirement, to the point that even SharePoint installed on your own servers does not support it.
Google, for its part, offers real-time presence on Office files opened through Drive for desktop, but on the same support page it warns that when several people edit an Office file at the same time new versions are created, and those changes have to be reconciled.
In practice: two colleagues working on the same Excel quote saved on Drive are not collaborating, they are producing two files that someone will have to compare by hand. It is not a hidden flaw, it is written in both companies’ documentation. It is just that almost nobody reads it before choosing the platform.
On Mac the supported ground narrows sooner
Here things become sharper, and it is the part that in our experience surprises clients the most.
Google Workspace Sync for Microsoft Outlook, the tool that lets Outlook talk to a Google account, does not support macOS. It is not a temporary limitation or a bug: macOS appears explicitly among the exclusions in the official system requirements. Likewise, Google states that the Outlook and Drive integration is available on Windows only.
This means a company with a fleet of Macs running Google Workspace has no supported path to use desktop Outlook. Those who try end up on improvised setups that work until the next update arrives.
On top of this come subtler but daily frictions that recur with suspicious regularity in user reports:
- The file is reported as locked. You try to save from Word or Excel to Drive and the system replies that the file is in use, because Drive is syncing at the same moment the app is writing.
- Saving stops working intermittently. The file opens from Finder without trouble, but Office can no longer save it, and the only fix is to quit and reopen Google Drive.
- Access-privilege errors when opening documents, appearing after Drive updates on macOS.
- On macOS, Drive requires manually enabling accessibility permissions: one extra step that multiplies across a fleet of machines.
The workarounds circulating in forums tell the story better than any analysis: save to the Desktop and then move the file into Drive, or switch from Mirror to Stream mode. They are sensible tips, but they describe people working around the tool instead of using it.
Outlook: a wall you can see coming
There is also a matter of perspective worth attention now, not when it becomes a problem.
Google’s sync tool supports only classic desktop Outlook: the official requirements list versions from 2016 to 2021 and the Microsoft 365 desktop app, while the web, Android, iOS, macOS and Microsoft Store versions are excluded.
Meanwhile Microsoft is gradually moving users to the new Outlook for Windows, which runs precisely on the Store channel. The two trajectories do not converge. Anyone keeping Google plus desktop Outlook alive today is on a setup that depends on a version Microsoft is leaving behind.
That this coexistence is fragile has already been seen: some older versions of the sync tool blocked the upgrade to Windows 11 24H2 on the PCs where they were installed, and a more recent version caused Outlook to close unexpectedly while syncing contacts, so much so that the advice was to roll back to an earlier release.
When Google Workspace is the right choice
This needs saying just as clearly, because the point of this article is not that one platform is better than the other.
If a company works natively in Docs and Sheets, Google Workspace is an excellent product, and on simultaneous collaboration it offers a smoother experience than you get by going through files. Young companies, distributed teams, organisations without decades of spreadsheets behind them: there Workspace works very well and there is no reason to change.
The problem is not Google. The problem is the half-and-half: one company’s collaboration platform and the other’s working tools. It is in that no-man’s-land that time gets burned.
How to actually decide
The useful question is not which suite is better, but a much more mundane one: what does your team actually work on every day? Not what the org chart says, what the files say.
- Look at the formats, not the opinions. How many .xlsx and .docx files are opened on a normal day? If the answer is “almost all of them”, the platform should be chosen accordingly.
- Count the Macs. It is the variable that narrows the range of supported setups the most, and almost nobody factors it in when choosing.
- Ask who works on the same files. If two or more people touch the same documents, simultaneous editing stops being a theoretical issue.
- Estimate the hours lost. Half an hour a week each on files that will not save, across fifteen people, is nearly fifty working days a year. It is the cost that appears in no quote because nobody invoices it.
Whatever the conclusion, the advice we give most often is the same: pick one platform and stay inside it. Mixed setups hold up only as long as someone keeps them together, and that someone usually is not paid to do it.
The cost you don’t see
The reason this topic stays under the radar is that the cost of the half-and-half never arrives as an invoice. It arrives as ten minutes lost here, a file recovered there, a meeting postponed because the right version cannot be found. Spread across a year and a headcount, it becomes a serious figure that nobody ever decided to spend.
It is worth looking it in the eye once, with your own company’s numbers in front of you, and then choosing knowingly. Whether you end up on Microsoft, on Google or where you already are, what matters is that it is a decision and not an inheritance.
