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Comment by blinkingled | Hacker News Reader

From the wired review :

    Half the apps pre-installed on the Surface RT launches in the classic desktop interface, most notably Microsoft Office, where the smaller user elements do not play nicely with the touch interface.

From AnandTech's review just typing into Office takes 50% CPU.

I had totally expected Microsoft will get Office right - touch friendly, not relying on classic Desktop and relatively bloat free. If integrated well with the tablet interface it would become a better productivity machine for Enterprise users than competition's offerings.

With what is being said of Office RT, I don't see what the selling point of Surface is - It is Windows but can't run Windows apps, it is a tablet but needs to switch to classic to run a so-so version of touch-unfriendly Office (Do I get Outlook with it?).

May be it will be a better story with Surface Pro.

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According to a friend at MSFT, these issues are all sorted on office 2013 RTM which only went gold yesterday.

And is that the version we'll be seeing on the Surface?

Surface currently has a preview version of Office on it with the promise from MS that it will get an upgrade to the RTM version. The Office team probably just wasn't ready in time for product launch.

Ah. Good to hear :)

You will be able to update to it.

I'm a little confused. I thought windows RT didn't have a 'classic mode' - and all apps were metro-style?

All third-party RT apps have to be Metro-style. Microsoft granted themselves an exception to that rule for Office RT and IE.

More precisely, the exception is for preinstalled apps.

So 3rd-party vendors of WinRT tablets could bundle a bunch of crap in Desktop mode again?

No. He mean system tools like Task Manager, File Explorer, Power Shell and apps like Notepad, Paint and Calc.

It is interesting that regarding productivity tools (email and office) their competitor is not iPad or Android but Blackberry PlayBook. iPad and Android can be made competitive here as well (you just need to spend extra $) but PlayBook has everything preinstalled already.

Not to mention the fact that he had a copy of Office Preview. Stuff can still get changed in the software until the final version, and from my personal experience with Microsoft products it almost always fixes these kind of bugs.

Even from Windows7, I've been using the Office web apps via my SkyDrive almost exclusively. No real issues that I've run into and I think most people should be doing that on a Surface(Poor messaging by MS). The full Office is there for power users IMHO.

That said, its desktop mode Office because they are emulating(or just ported) the old Win32 libraries used to run old office code. This is likely the cause of the CPU spike.

Windows (NT) has been cross-platform from day one, so there wasn't any need to emulate anything. The kernel, Win32 and everything that ships by default with it ran on at least x86, x64 (Itanium), x86-64, DEC Alpha, PowerPC and others. So yes, it was likely ported (but I doubt there was significantly more effort than just rebuilding everything, given that the code shouldn't be that unportable to begin with).

>I had totally expected Microsoft will get Office right

I don't know why you'd expect this. The office team has always been one of the biggest violators of any HIG or best practices guide that the windows team publishes, I find it hard to imagine that a new version of windows will suddenly make office a well-behaved windows app, when it has failed to do so for the last 7 versions.

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