Market Share for Office Productivity Published

Each year I have the task of estimating the revenue of two major products that don’t publish revenue: Microsoft 365 + Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.  It’s necessary in order to understand their place in other markets that I track, namely content services platforms and content collaboration tools. And at least both vendors publish revenue for financial segments above their enterprise productivity suites (I subtract out consumer usage). 

I do this based on our client conversations and a survey of usage. Some hinting also comes into play when I split Google revenue between office suites and content collaboration platforms (for the Google Drive component) and Microsoft revenue among six different categories and see how they line up in revenue and growth to competitors. The result is still just an estimate, but it gives an estimate of a market that most information workers use on a daily basis. 

The answer of all this number crunching for 2021 was that Microsoft continues to dominate the market for productivity suites. That’s probably a given. But Google continues to take 1% to 2% of market share per year, often through additive spending rather than competitive takeouts.

I don’t think these findings should affect companies looking to buy one or the other: they are both viable products.  It’s more interesting for service providers deciding on where to allocate resources for migration, customization, integration and adoption solutions. And of course for independent software providers (ISVs) looking for opportunities to plug into one ecosystem or another.  These decisions are tricky because they depend more on localized tactical imbalances in supply (competing consultants or ISVs) and demand (by feature, region, or industry).

For more (and a cool Sankey diagram showing the makeup of the sub-components of this market) clients can see the new version of my analysis of productivity suite market share here.