Escaping Microsoft sounds simple on paper – until a company like Airbus proves just how messy it can get in real life.
Seven years after announcing a bold break from Microsoft, Airbus is still in the middle of its long, complicated transition to Google Workspace, and the finish line keeps moving. The plan was to shift more than 100,000 employees from Microsoft Office to Google’s cloud-based tools, but the reality has turned out to be far more challenging than anyone publicly predicted.
Airbus originally told around 130,000 staff that it would retire Microsoft’s productivity apps and standardize on Google’s suite of online tools. The vision was clear: fewer legacy tools, more collaboration in the cloud, and a tighter alignment with Google’s ecosystem. At the time, this looked like a headline win for Google and a very visible snub to Microsoft.
Then-CEO Tom Enders set an aggressive target: the entire migration wrapped up within about a year and a half. In retrospect, internal leadership now admits that this timeline was “extremely ambitious” – a polite way of saying it underestimated the complexity of changing the digital habits and workflows of a massive global enterprise.
Where the migration stands now
Today, Airbus employs roughly 150,000 people, and more than two-thirds of them have fully moved over to Google Workspace as their main productivity platform. That covers day-to-day communication, collaboration, and a lot of document work across large swaths of the organization.
But the switch is far from universal. Significant teams still lean on Microsoft tools, especially where Google’s offerings hit technical or feature limitations. The result is a hybrid reality: much of Airbus operates in Google’s world, but important pockets of the business remain deeply tied to Microsoft.
Why Excel still rules in finance
One of the biggest sticking points is finance. Airbus’s finance teams continue to depend heavily on Excel, not because they are nostalgic, but because their spreadsheets are enormous and mission-critical.
Some of these files can involve around 20 million cells or more, pushing well beyond what Google Sheets can comfortably handle today. This is not just a small annoyance; it’s a fundamental capacity issue. When spreadsheets reach that scale, performance, stability, and reliability become non‑negotiable.
Airbus leadership has acknowledged that Google Sheets simply doesn’t yet match Excel for these extreme use cases. There have been comments about technical caps such as the maximum number of cells per file, and how those limits make it hard to move certain workloads away from Excel. The company does expect to shift more of this work over time as Google improves its tools, but for now, Excel remains the backbone for some financial operations.
Here’s where it gets controversial: if your finance processes depend on gigantic spreadsheets, is it even realistic to expect Google Sheets to fully replace Excel any time soon?
The contract and legal roadblock
It’s not just finance that struggles with the move. Commercial, procurement, and legal teams also rely on very specific capabilities when dealing with contracts and other high‑stakes documents.
These teams need extremely robust change tracking and versioning. When you are negotiating contracts worth millions or billions, you must see every edit, every comment, and every revision in a way that is precise and legally defensible. Microsoft Word has offered mature, deeply trusted tools for this kind of work for years.
Google Docs, while strong for everyday collaboration, is still closing the gap in this advanced territory. Airbus leaders have pointed out that Google is actively improving its change‑tracking and compatibility features, with a roadmap that includes a promise of full compatibility with Microsoft formats in the near future, reportedly targeting around 2026.
This means that for now, many teams are forced to juggle both ecosystems: some work done in Google, some in Microsoft. That mixed environment inevitably introduces compatibility problems—formatting quirks, features that don’t translate perfectly, and friction when files bounce between platforms.
And this is the part most people miss: “going cloud” doesn’t automatically mean you can ditch legacy tools if contracts, regulations, and tiny technical details still favor the old software.
The compatibility headache
When documents move back and forth between Google Workspace and Microsoft Office, they don’t always behave nicely. Airbus staff have reported ongoing compatibility issues that can disrupt workflows, force manual fixes, or even push people back to the original Microsoft files to avoid risk.
Some engineers inside Airbus, speaking without attribution, have confirmed that these compatibility headaches are real enough that they still rely on Excel for key tasks. It is not just inertia; it’s a pragmatic response to tools that still don’t interoperate perfectly.
As a result, Airbus continues to pay for Microsoft licenses, even while investing heavily in Google’s platform. The company has not publicly detailed the exact cost or scale of these remaining licenses, but it is clear they have not fully severed financial ties with Microsoft.
From Google’s side, there is an ongoing effort to close these gaps: better handling of large files, more advanced functions in Google Sheets, improved document traceability, and stronger interoperability with Microsoft formats. Airbus leadership has given Google credit for being willing to adapt its roadmap to meet these enterprise demands.
Security, secrecy, and the cloud
Beyond functionality and compatibility, there is a hard regulatory line that technology cannot simply wish away. Some Airbus work involves military‑classified or defense‑related documents, which cannot legally be stored in the public cloud.
Those materials must stay in highly secured, on‑premises environments. For that kind of data, cloud‑first tools like Google Workspace are not an option, regardless of features. This forces certain teams to remain on locally hosted Microsoft software for the foreseeable future.
Crucially, this limitation is not about Google’s capabilities as a product. It’s about strict rules around national security, defense, and classified information. No matter how attractive a cloud platform is, those regulations effectively lock some workflows into on‑premise systems.
Here’s a potential flashpoint: should cloud providers be building specialized, sovereign, on‑prem or hybrid solutions to win this kind of work, or is it reasonable that companies like Airbus maintain dual environments indefinitely?
Why Airbus matters so much to Google
For Google, Airbus is not just another customer; it is a marquee account in a space dominated by Microsoft. Winning Airbus signaled that Google could compete for large, conservative, highly regulated enterprises.
That makes keeping Airbus happy a strategic priority. Improving Workspace to handle massive spreadsheets, advanced legal workflows, and bulletproof compatibility is not only about one customer—it is about proving to the wider market that Google can be a serious alternative in areas where Microsoft has long been the default.
Airbus executives have indicated that Google is committed to enhancing file size limits, adding more advanced functions to Google Sheets, and strengthening traceability features across the Workspace suite. If Google delivers on these promises, more of Airbus’s lingering Microsoft‑dependent workloads could eventually shift to the cloud platform.
The bigger question: Is a full break realistic?
What Airbus is experiencing raises a broader question that many large organizations should ask: is a complete, clean break from Microsoft (or any deeply embedded platform) actually realistic, or will hybrid environments be the long‑term norm?
On one hand, a single standardized toolset is attractive: simpler support, fewer licenses, more unified training, and tighter integrations. On the other hand, real‑world constraints like huge financial spreadsheets, legal review requirements, and strict security regulations can anchor parts of the business to legacy tools.
Some might argue that Airbus underestimated just how embedded Microsoft was in its critical processes. Others might say this is exactly what innovation looks like: painful, gradual, and full of compromises along the way.
So here’s the controversial angle: is Airbus blazing a trail that others will follow, proving that Google can eventually rival Microsoft even in the toughest corners of the enterprise—or is this an expensive, drawn‑out experiment that shows just how hard it is to actually leave Microsoft behind?
Your turn: what do you think?
- If you were running IT at a company like Airbus, would you keep pushing hard toward Google, or double down on a hybrid setup and accept permanent dual platforms?
- Do you believe Google will truly reach full, seamless compatibility with Microsoft formats by the timelines being talked about, or will there always be edge cases that keep Excel and Word in the picture?
- And most importantly: is it wiser for large organizations to pursue “cloud purity” with one vendor, or to embrace a messy but flexible combination of tools from multiple ecosystems?
Share where you stand: should Airbus be applauded for its ambition to move away from Microsoft, or criticized for a migration that still isn’t finished after all these years?
