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Comment by runjake | Hacker News Reader

I've used it, it seemed great. There are a couple reasons I don't use it, though:

1. It's not Microsoft's bread and butter. History has shown when it's no longer cost-effective, they'll drop it or neglect it in a heartbeat.

2. Say it does become wildly successful and pushes out its major competition (Dropbox & Drive), history has shown they'll still neglect it until it bit rots enough that a competitor can grab a foothold (eg. IE, Office, Hotmail, etc etc etc).

Microsoft has awesome, awesome engineering people. They just need to change their vision and their leadership.

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> history has shown they'll still neglect it until it bit rots enough that a competitor can grab a foothold (eg. IE, Office, Hotmail, etc etc etc).

Umm, Microsoft has neglected Office? What's your definition of neglecting?

- Spending more than 100 million anually in R&D dollars on Office?

- Employing some of their top talent on it?

- Giving Office their own division inside of Microsoft?

- having the second largest head count of any division in Microsoft?

- cannibalizing some of their own sales to move it to the web while desktop sales are still at all time highs?

Neglecting: Throwing little more than a new coat of paint on something and incrementing the version number.

And what has that $100m annually produced? The Ribbon interface? New themes?

You might argue Office 365, but I see that as a desperate reaction to the cannibalization Google Docs is causing them, not an innovation.

The usability of Office before the Ribbon vs. the usability of Office after the Ribbon is like night and day. It was a massive overhaul, and it was for the better - the product is, IMO, far easier to understand.

It's a huge innovation, and frankly I think it's silly to discount it as a "coat of paint".

For new users, perhaps. For people that have been using office since '97, it was a huge kick in the face.

That lasts a month or two.

They don't notice they're more productive later. "Oh, it was awful." And they're doing whizzier things faster than before.

Often, people just hate change.

Strongly disagree. I am far less productive using the ribbon interface, and have been for years. I have never "gotten used to it."

Oh, come on. You seriously don't mean that. If you are you can't be using it much.

It's that hard to believe that I think one of their latest innovations sucks? I use Excel on a regular basis for simple regression analyses and data shuffling.

>>Often, people just hate change.

No, people hate sudden change. When it comes to more gradual change, such as the user interface progression from XP to Vista and then to Win 7, it is totally fine. But going from Win 7 to Win 8? Not so much. (Yes, Win 8 will have an old-style UI option, but that's not the point.)

Any interface change is a kick in the face to people who have been heavy users of the software. That does not mean that every change is for the worse.

The Ribbon interface was a massive upgrade in usability for the office division, that I'm _still_ not sure how they pulled off as well as they did - I can easily imagine 20% of that $100mm went into the Ribbon interface.

For those of us who hop between Visio, Word, Excel, Power Point - it's been a godsend. I don't know of a single users who puts more than 10 hours / week that (after a month or two of grousing over how the new was crappier than the old) - didn't consider it a major upgrade - particularly as for keyboard jockeys - the old keyboard shortcuts are still there.

The transition to the old crufty Menu Interface to the Ribbon interface, in my mind, was as big a difference for my productivity as the transition from the "Different-Menu's-per-application" of the Legacy era to the "Standard-Menu's-per-app" of the Macintosh era.

Off the top of my head:

* A new, standardized document format that's trivial for hackers to open up and play with.

* More stability across the board

* New products added (OneNote is lovely for instance)

* More stable rendering - gone are the days (for me at least) where saving, closing and re-opening a Word document had things moving around

* Much more reliable saving and document recovery

* Creating Office Live and bringing it up to date with the new Windows family (Metro interface etc) which to me is a strong indicator they're not going to drop it any time soon

And of course, if it's great and you use it and they do drop it, you can just import your documents into Google Docs or <insert competitor software here> and get on with editing them.

Which versions are you thinking of in particular? I know 2007 added OneNote, and from what I've been able to tell 2010 improved stability over 2007.

In all fairness, it's hard to improve without impetus. Madden (all sports, really) releases a new edition every year that's largely the same as the year before. Look at iOS6.

That said, some of MS's divisions could really use some turnover.

And 'small things' like this;

http://rise4fun.com/QuickCode

I get the feeling you haven't used IE, hotmail and office for a while. They're definitely not rotting.

I use IE and Office daily. You didn't read my statement correctly:

"they'll still neglect it until it bit rots enough that a competitor can grab a foothold"

Fair point - I agree there.

They are not rotting today, but only because of competitive pressure from Firefox, Chrome, GMail, Yahoo and Open Office. There was a long period of MS lounging after winning the space.

Yes, competition drives innovation.

This will not go away, so I wouldn't worry about it.

successful companies cannibalize themselves before the competition does not after.

Your parent is referring to the long time period before Firefox really took off that IE6 was Microsoft's best offering, and we've all heard how terrible it was ad nauseum. Even once FF took off, it took them years, until IE9 in fact, to release a browser that could be considered semi-modern and standards compliant, and it still is missing a number of important features, and isn't even available on Windows XP.

That IE is no longer rotting is certainly true, but that's only because of the competitive pressure from FF (and now Chrome and Safari as well, of course.)

The same IE that had a major bug recently and Governments everywhere were recommending to move away from it?

Every browser suffers this occasionally. In fact every piece of software does. To suddenly throw it all out is childish. Look at the SQL injection vulnerability in rails recently. Has that killed it? Looks at the java vulnerability. Has that killed it? Look at the number of ssh worms - has that killed it?

>Looks at the java vulnerability. Has that killed it?

    <post type="cynical">

With any luck...

    </post>

SkyDrive is definitely Microsoft's bread and butter. Microsoft Office created $15 billion in profit for Microsoft last year, and collaboration is now an essential feature of productivity software.

SkyDrive is good, but Google Drive is way faster, especially if you replace the default Google client with a third party one like SyncDocs.

What makes me the most suspicious of it is the content policy they have in place and I've been told they're actually enforcing. Basically it says you can't have certain things in skydrive, otherwise they'll terminate all the services connected to your Microsoft account. It's not that hard to imagine a scenario where this could be a problem. Say you have image auto-upload on on your Lumia, and in a party some drunken fellow decides to take a picture of his naughty bits. Off goes your MS account and all the services and data with it?

You can very well have the same issue with Google. There are folks who have had their Google account shut down for some innocuous issue with Gmail, G+. It hasn't necessarily lead to an exodus from Google.

I think the reference[1] is to the person who got all his MS access suspended (including XBOX Live and other unrelated stuff) because he had some deemed illegal (by MS) pictures in his private storage. What Google examples are there of that? Google also cuts off ONLY the service you are supposedly abusing; if you abuse adsense, you cannot use adsense anymore, you CAN use adwords, gmail and others with the same account. MS seems to cut off complete access to everything.

Disclaimer: this is what I read in previous HN post; I did not try (and will not try) Skydrive until fully debunked. I have no mercy, interest or would ever use services that automatically cut off multiple services for something I do with my private storage. If I cannot post photos of my kids playing naked in a pool in our garden on my private storage then what is that private storage for exactly? Showing those scary American family portraits (example: http://iso-100.com/images/photos/SlacumFamilyPortrait.jpg) and that's it?

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4265086

Yes, this was the incident I was referring to. Pardon for omitting the source reference.

EDIT: And yes, I'm aware that Google and probably all the other providers as well do this with the publicly shared pictures. But they should have no business monitoring privately stored data. Maybe hash checking for known illegal files (CP and similar) could be an exception.

Where does it stop though? Checking for known child pornography is of course a very valid reason and the law enforcement agencies have hashes for a lot of those images. However if you make that exception, other 'illegal' things would have to be screened as well and then you have where we are now. Why not make different categories of 'illegal'; CP matching hashes is a direct hit and gone you are. While 'illegal to distribute' (which probably gets more pressure to fight against than even cp) would be flagged in private; if you move it to public you have a problem.

I believe that private means you cannot touch it at all, but we are talking 'the cloud' here so that option is out the door anyway.

I used a predecessor to SkyDrive called Windows Live Sync (a.k.a Windows FolderShare), which just synced folders on different computers.

They came out with a new version in 2010 called Windows Live Mesh which didn't support Windows XP--fine, no big deal. But then they announced that the old version would stop working. No upgrade path. Microsoft didn't host your files, just an index of the files, so it couldn't be that expensive.

I still find it inexplicable, but I've learned my lesson. Don't trust Microsoft to continue to support old products.

It's a bit more complicated. Mesh predates SkyDrive (and Dropbox for that matter). It was in beta since before Vista, if I'm not mistaken. It was truly visionary product. Then something happened and it never got released properly, instead FolderShare or Live Sync came up, which was a far cry from the original vision. Mesh beta continued to exist. The Live Mesh release appeared in 2010: functionally it became closer to the original beta, but very toned down (did you know that there was an idea of "Mesh apps"?). And then SkyDrive started to gain steam and recently its app was released. This app dropped shared folder sync and remote desktop features. Mesh is and was a superset of both SkyDrive and Live Sync apps.

Live Mesh held so much promise that I am still a little disappointed that Microsoft decided to sunset it. Not only did it do what SkyDrive and Dropbox do today but it also did file and folder syncing, bookmark and application settings syncing along with Remote Desktop between shared machines. I think Live Mesh shutting down was one of the reasons why Ray Ozzie left MS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Live_Mesh

Pretty sure they see the SAS office stuff as their bread and butter going forward - they have been steering SMB to office 365 for more than a year.

But it was relatively neglected between the 2003 and 2010 versions. Not many new features were added or innovations made, aside from the Ribbon interface and new theming.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/faqs.aspx

Q. What is the difference between Office and Office 365?

Office is productivity software (including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and OneNote) that is installed on your desktop or laptop computer. Office 365 is an online subscription service that provides email, shared calendars, the ability to create and edit documents online, instant messaging, web conferencing, a public website for your business, and internal team sites—all accessible anywhere from nearly any device.

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