Good to see that, competition is always good for the users, and Apple, Google and MS all seem to be quite strong on their fields (although Google is the most fashionable nowadays).
But what's shocking is that the first tablet-optimized version of Office is arriving not on Windows RT, but on iOS. That speaks volumes about the state of Windows today – and about how Nadella is under no illusions.
Office for iPad may have started under Ballmer, but it's hard to imagine it getting this high a priority without his successor making what I'm sure was a tough call.
They have to compete now, and their software should sell on its own merits, not because of platform lock-in network effects. This will make Microsoft a better company with a higher quality product.
https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-student/office-2...
The most exciting thing would be Mono becoming a first-class citizen for .NET.
I think this is likely for two reasons:
1) They may well acquire Xamarin, which would result in them 'owning' Mono.
2) The new CEO has been extremely forward thinking vs the rest of Microsoft on supporting open source software on Azure.
3) Increasing amounts of ASP.NET and other .NET technologies are open source now
I would love for them to do this. I think they'd also do very well out of it, as Azure is great platform.
Imho, their strategy for asp.net can be easily what you described here.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Microsoft+Co...
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/12/5404098/microsoft-consider...
If anyone at Microsoft is reading this thread, please for the love of god spend some time on vagrant-windows, the WinRM gem and making it easy for us to make open-source projects available on windows. It's a nice gesture to make InternetExplorer VMs available for website testing, but if you can't easily automate the testing via tools like vagrant it's really only half a solution.
I needed help from some of them to transfer management (have my own domain name now). He called me within 2 hours, the same evening he watched my screen and we followed the additional required steps (wouldn't have found those steps solo i'm affraid).
Great and fast support, i guess that's why Microsoft is "enterprise".
(ps. Subscription wasn't hard, you have to explain your idea and what you're trying to build. Then you get access to Media Services, Virtual Machines, ...)
And office is becoming worse, merging is awful, online editing is completely broken (saving.... saving.... saving....)
Subscriptions bleed money from users continually, regardless of how often they use something. Paying for major upgrades only allows the user to upgrade based on whether they need certain features and potentially skip every other update or so if they use the software only lightly.
For example, my personal at-home copy of MS Office is the 2003 version. I use it so rarely that this does not matter, especially with other options available that can view and edit MS Office documents.
I stopped using VMWare Fusion, for example, because they got into the habit of releasing paid upgrade versions that were required in order to run on Apple's new OS X version. Perhaps it's not their fault that Apple's OS updates broke VMWare's virutalization, but I don't use this often enough at home to want to pay for an upgrade every year. Before I would pay for an upgrade every 2 or 3 years. Now I've switched to VirtualBox at home.
For business use, software is used much more often and it matters a lot more to have it up-to-date. So in that case a yearly subscription might make sense.
If you really use Office every day during the workday, it's worth the money. The $15/m that my company pays per user for our 365 account is well worth the money.
I don't understand why that was downvoted. Office 365 is expensive...compared to a one-time purchase you own forever. I don't understand why users aren't showing more resistance to subscription-based software (Microsoft, Adobe, etc.)...it's as if people enjoy getting screwed over.
That was always the real danger I saw for Microsoft as they delayed supporting iOS. Folks buy the devices anyway, despite their lack of Office. Then folks find out that they can do what they want to do despite that lack of Office. Maybe they've been using it by default, not because they really need it. Then Microsoft comes out with Office for iOS and there's a collective shrug and a "meh".
A long time ago I thought that LibreOffice or Pages were close enough, good enough to not need Office, but in reality there is still some random document once in a while that has the history messed up, or the layout hides a part of the text, or images are not at the right place. It might be 98% OK, but you can't always afford to give up on the 2% of information your are missing.
Forcing Office users to give a sensible version of the files when sharing is the best solution, but having a native iOS version of Office for when that's not an option is invaluable.
We really should get a campaign going to persuade people to keep their Word and Powerpoint formats simple. Usually interop problems only happen when people do weird formatting things that look terrible anyway.
I've seen much more openness to other document formats across industries. It's a bit like BYOD in enterprise, but at the document level. For example, it's been 5 years since I've been at a conference that requires slides to be PPT.
They will probably always own the high end: advanced documents for the 20% of knowledge workers that need those features; custom Enterprise workflows, etc. But fewer and fewer people will ever require access to the Office Suite in any form.
This is a good move, and Microsoft has always been better as the underdog, they've just been away from that role for a long time.
Seems like they're missing an opportunity to drive adoption of Office as an online platform. Why would I want to publish using Office instead of Google Docs when I can't assume that people I send the Office doc to will be able to edit it? Sure, Office is better, but not better enough to overcome that.
If it was free to edit, but $$$ to publish, Office 365 would be much more compelling. Especially since the situation w/r/t mobile looks much better than Google Docs.
Edit: My point here is about network effects, not whether the subscription is worth it. Office previously benefited from them, but it's vulnerable as a cloud platform given the free alternatives from Google and even Apple.
If you publish/upload the document to OneDrive (7 GB is free) you can send the link to anyone and then they can view and edit the document for free in the browser, just like with Google Docs.
I can't help but wonder, however, how would you expect Office Online to compare to Google Docs in terms of privacy (including in the long run)?
That said, $100/yr is extremely expensive in most countries in the world.
Sure sounds expensive to me. I'll stick to the Apple office suite for now.
Subscriptions are good for utility type services which are stable, has continuous consumption, has very low margins of profit and has much less competition.
Adobe's subscription model is dumb. They are purely thriving on consumer mindshare but these prices are going to start hurting. Adobe's core business is ripe for breaking in.
Because Google Docs continues to suck?
Granted, that gives you access to a huge suite of applications. But if you only need, say, three of them, you can subscribe individually, which at $20/app/month, would cost you a mere $720/year!
And unlike Office, which is still available as a desktop app without a subscription, Adobe has discontinued its entire non-subscription-based suite.
The simplicity of the sharing the subscriptions made me a believer.
There will always be people who will complain about the cost of subscription for both XBL and Office 365, but I think it is reasonably priced at least in the US.
2 parents + 3 kids? Not bad. Not sure what the stance is on doing some "framily" thing where you share it with friends.
And even the 60 Skype minutes has come in handy when I've needed to make international calls.
I'm still not a huge fan of applications I'm used to buying once every few years moving to the subscription model, but admittedly there are some positives with what MS has done here.
1. How many documents do you never share with anybody else?
2. The same model seems to work fine for Adobe Acrobat.
Especially w.r.t #2: if they get the editor on many, and the viewer on a large fraction of devices, this might hurt PDF a bit.
Would I start to think this way about Word docs? Is that good for MS?
[1] http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/13/announcing-office-365-per...
PowerPoint: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-powerpoint-for-ipa...
"I called up Bill and said, “I’m going to turn this thing around.” Bill always had a soft spot for Apple. We got him into the application software business. The first Microsoft apps were Excel and Word for the Mac. So I called him and said, “I need help.” Microsoft was walking over Apple’s patents. I said, “If we kept up our lawsuits, a few years from now we could win a billion-dollar patent suit. You know it, and I know it. But Apple’s not going to survive that long if we’re at war. I know that. So let’s figure out how to settle this right away. All I need is a commitment that Microsoft will keep developing for the Mac and an investment by Microsoft in Apple so it has a stake in our success." -- Steve Jobs.
Reading between the lines, a less polite version is that Jobs went to Bill Gates and said, "I need a lifeline. Apple is circling the drain. You are going to throw me that lifeline. We are going to do a deal whereby I drop our patent suits against you, and in return you invest in Apple and support us with Office, and say we're best buddies in public. Or else I wind up Apple as a computer company and spend the remaining billion dollars in our accounts on turning Apple into the biggest, baddest patent troll ever. And I will go kamikaze on your ass, and there will be blood and screaming and absolutely no mercy, because I offered you this deal and you turned it down and I remember my enemies forever. Oh and by the way, the DOJ anti-trust folks will be watching. Deal or no deal?"
(This is quite distinct from the 1983/84 Jobs/Gates deal whereby Steve gave Bill an exclusive to be the first office app vendor on the Mac -- as described in "Fire in the Valley" and elsewhere -- which is how Word for Mac got started.)
Playing up the ribbon in the presentation? Curious as ribbon really has triggered a love it or hate it reaction.
What do you hate about it? I find it to be just a bigger toolbar.
The thing I care about the most is UI responsiveness, so Apple's iOS (upto 6, hate 7) UI has always impressed me with its fluidity. Google is web based which I hate the most. I cant understand how any sane person could use a shitty bloated web app over a high performance native application.
Our company moved entirely to Google Docs about 5 years ago. Being sent a Word file is like being handed a CD ROM - a brief moment for a 'Oh, one of those' mental gear change and a few minutes rummaging in the dead tech box for an external drive. Or in Office's case something that can reliably parse the file
We are witnessing a new Microsoft that began when new CEO Satya Nadella took the helm. This is his first of many acts to turn the company around, instead of the previous closed door approach Balmer preferred.
It's good to see Satya doesn't appear to be full brainwashed by the Microsoft cool-aid. This isn't 1998, Windows is no longer the dominant platform and it makes sense to open up your products to other platforms, especially given Microsoft's failure to break ground in the mobile market.
Now all Satya needs to do is bring back the start menu in Windows 9, get rid of that horrid Metro tile interface for non touch devices (or at the very least give users the option of the new Metro interface or classic desktop) and I'll be ecstatic.
The decision to release it is Nadella's.
I have. It's just a viewer for office formats.
If that subscription model takes be ready for Windows 9 to come as an Ad Supported Free Version and a paid version that costs 100 bucks a year cause you were so onboard with continuously paying for office for years on end.
[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2009/09/ba...
A qualifying Office 365 subscription is required to edit and create documents.
Qualifying plans include:
Office 365 Home
$99.99 PER YEAR
Office 365 Small Business Premium
$150.00 per user per year
Office 365 Midsize Business
$180.00 per user per year
Office 365 E3 and E4 (Enterprise and Government)
$264.00 per user per year
Office 365 Education A3 and A4
Students: $36.00 per user per year
Teachers: $72.00 per user per year
Office 365 Pro Plus
$?????
Office 365 University
Same as educational license?
That said, monthly subscriptions I avoid like the plague. Why? All is fine while business is good. When things aren't great subscriptions bleed much-needed capital. If cancelling your subscriptions means taking away such things as Office and email you are screwed and have to take money from some other part of the business to keep them going.
That's why I've always run our own email servers and always purchased licenses of software like Office Pro. We don't have to update the software every year. When things are good --and if it makes sense-- you upgrade. During lean times you have the option to not spend any money on upgrades and still have full usage of your software. Having experienced this a couple of times over the years I don't like the idea of any mission critical service being tied to a monthly per-user licence, it's a bad idea.
Beyond that, I wish MS would stop this nonsense of having so many layers to their products. One Windows and one Office, none of this "Home", "Home Premium", "Pro", "Pro Plus", "Really Really Pro Premium Plus", etc.
I do a lot of writing (I am pretty much addicted to writing books). I use my iPad for lots of casual writing using a good text editor and markdown files in Dropbox (target is leanpub.com). For some writing I like having Pages on both iOS and OS X with iCloud storage.
If Office 360 ends up being a compelling product for iPad and my MacBook Air, then the $99/year is a no-brainer decision.
http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/27/announcing-the-office-you...
In other words : Is there an "Open with Word Online" button for non office 365 subscribers?
I do not believe that feature is in Office for iPad and you should be able to point your browser to OneDrive.com/office.com to get to your documents using Word/Excel/PowerPoint/OneNote Online in the meantime.
This is a really interesting idea though so I'll bring it up with the team, thanks!
I also bet any other company would not get away with a model like that. Apple requires that you make payments through their AppStore or in-app Payment systems so it can collect its cut. Good luck trying to publishing something with the same model on the App Store.
Naturally if you buy a subscription from outside the app, Apple don't get a cut - that's how everything works and as long as you don't give the user a way to get to the non-Apple subscription payment system from inside the app, Apple is fine with that.
I for one am deeply disappointed with the direction Apple has taken with iWork.
Not least of which is the (a) removal of features and (b) incompatibility with recent versions of their own software [this has rendered large portions of my documents unreadable]
http://winsupersite.com/windows-8/there-are-now-over-110-mil...
http://ipod.about.com/od/ipadmodelsandterms/f/ipad-sales-to-...
As a side note, App Store search is still lacking: Looking for 'microsoft office' did not result in a single hit related to actual apps from Microsoft. Googling for App Store links to the four new apps was easier in the end …
Microsoft is finally adopting open source with open arms.
So, are they going to discard Windows (|phone|tablet|...) platform and become a pure third-party? It reminds me of Sega.
Microsoft has for whatever reason never hit the target with mobile platforms. I guess the Windows Phone is decent enough by some accounts but was just way too late to the party.
So they can try to make money selling mobile software for a mobile platform that nobody uses, or they can just accept reality and sell the software on all platforms.
If their mobile software succeeds and becomes as near-essential as Office once was, that could well create a halo effect for their mobile platforms. After all if you use MS software every day on your phone or tablet, why not buy an MS phone or tablet next time you're in the market for one?
Their first order of business in mobile is to become relevant again. Today took their best shot at that in a very long time.
In my opnion, Office is the ace software of Microsoft. It is even the de-facto standard. Therefore Microsoft should keep them exclusive on their platform.
You have no idea how much i want this to happen...
Siri integration, obviously. We've come full-circle.
So yeah, iPad.
This is lame, IMO, and so typical for MS.
There's a huge universe of companies more than willing to pay for these, and it's about time that MS take advantage of re-establishing Office as a cross-device dominant platform for the everyday office worker, rather than losing its edge as an office platform because of silly hardware / software politics internal to their own organization.
Edit: Fixed possible factual error.
Gates has attacked the iPad on every interview claiming that it's useless.