20 years of Google Scholar

Yes, Google deserves to be distrusted and avoided as a whole, but Google Scholar is a genuinely net good for humanity.

I have similar feeing for Gmail (it's effective anti spam engine), google maps and google docs (which pioneered shared docs. It feels outdated on many fronts now, but it was a pioneer).

Try MS OneDrive before calling google docs outdated

Google spanks everyone else on robustness and responsiveness

As much as I try to "de-google" myself and try to avoid being trapped in the Google eco system, I'd definitely choose it over MS Office. I am stuck in the MS Office eco system at work. Some of their products are starting to improve in MS Office, but you can still tell it's a lot of hacks ontop of old systems. Especially when it comes to the whole teams/onedrive/sharepoint side of things.

One of my biggest gripes right now is that we heavily rely on Microsoft Teams. A lot of our work laptops still are stuck on 8gb of ram. I find Microsoft Teams can easily suck back a full gig or more or ram, especially when in a video call. From my understanding, Teams is running essentially like an Electron app (except using an Edge browser packaged).

I have no problem with web based apps, but man, some optimization is called for.

I use a decade-old NUC with plenty of RAM as a daily driver. It doesn't struggle with anything except MS Teams. It can churn through Zoom or Meet calls while compiling code. Teams is a bloated mess that makes the fans spin at max RPM.

It's crazy I can boot a kernel, with an entire graphics and network stack, X and a terminal in less than 200 MB but then the Teams webapp uses a massive amount of resources and grinds everything else to a halt.

Word 365 also becomes incredibly laggy on long documents with tons of comments, whereas Google Docs is just fine. But, apparently, this is also a thing on modern hardware. I guess these days Microsoft has little attention to detail.