As a medium scale business user (<50 employees) of Office365 at one of my companies, this is so much better than buying the old model of Office license that it's obvious this turns profitable. Between the always updated, the no up front payment, the ability to easily change your number of users, ... It's simply a superior solution in every way for me.
I also use G-suite at another with a lot less people (3), and it also has a lot of advantages, although I admit that while for my personal use I ignore the whole "will Google keep supporting this", I try to make as little as possible of my business rely on service Google might close, and have on occasion built our own, admittedly inferior internal product for a functionality that we had in G-suite but that is so core to our business that I wouldn't dare depend on it and risk being caught off guard (prototype before self rewriting was a google forms to sheets to processing pipeline, and super super simple to put in place, but are you going to bet on Google keeping forms going five years from now ?).
Still, I would definitely recommend it, as the tools are great. And this is the only time ever in my (short) business decision making life that I was scared of Google closing something, I still very much trust them for services I pay.
... which is well-intended, but it scares me if that means that all of my installations have version updates at the same time without manual intervention or advance notification. What if there's a defect or an introduced fail in backward compatibility? I'd be dead in the water.
Can you designate phased updates such that managers/leads are updated first, followed by staged updates for the remainder (with manual on-demand update available, of course)?
In my experience, there is too little attention given to backward compatibility. Even we as customers are using a feature "incorrectly", it's still a problem if your legacy code base (or applications and documents, in the Office example) is broken by an unexpected update.
The last update, I was warned that an update would be rolled out to my users before it started. I don't remember how long of a delay I had, I am certain I could not schedule it to a time of my choosing BUT I could force it to happen right now on a user by user basis. Which is what we ended up doing so as to control our update time.
As for the backward compatibility, I agree in general but disagree about office, or particularly about word and excel. Its support for legacy stuff is insane, and a large part of why companies with lot of legacy stuff aren't moving to another solution anytime soon.
Are you talking about E1 plan or the one with desktop apps?
Our company got burned with the webapp nonsense pretty bad. We first tried Google docs which were woefully inadequate and buggy and slow, then we switched to the office webapps, which were no better until we finally returned to using desktop apps, and using a local IT service to stick a file server with raid and daily backups.
I can never understand how people tolerate webapps for anything serious.
The one with the desktop apps, we pay about 9 euros per user per month. For that price every user gets the latest version of word/excel/powerpoint, as well as a few others that we don't use. Updates are done automatically, and each user is allowed 5 simultaneous installs with their keys (desktop computer, work laptop, phone, ...). Agreed about webapp only offers, I would not buy office 365 for that. In fact we even make a point of removing One Drive because I have no trust in Microsoft with that.
For G-suite (google docs/sheets/... for business), I find it works great as an api store that also can give you direct access as sheets/docs/... Non tech people can create stuff (templates, models, stats ...) the way they're used too, and it's super easy to integrate automation into it while keeping everything in a format that Janice from accounting or Bob from support can access in real time with the doc/spreadsheet format they're used to.
I find it much better than office's offering for that. But they're definitely not two interchangeable solutions.
I also use G-suite at another with a lot less people (3), and it also has a lot of advantages, although I admit that while for my personal use I ignore the whole "will Google keep supporting this", I try to make as little as possible of my business rely on service Google might close, and have on occasion built our own, admittedly inferior internal product for a functionality that we had in G-suite but that is so core to our business that I wouldn't dare depend on it and risk being caught off guard (prototype before self rewriting was a google forms to sheets to processing pipeline, and super super simple to put in place, but are you going to bet on Google keeping forms going five years from now ?). Still, I would definitely recommend it, as the tools are great. And this is the only time ever in my (short) business decision making life that I was scared of Google closing something, I still very much trust them for services I pay.