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Comment by gvb | Hacker News Reader

It is very interesting that Sinofsky was unable to get Office "Metroified" before release of Win8rt. That indicates a failure of the Office code base or a failure of the Office division's ability to adapt. This is doubly interesting in that Office is where Sinofsky "made his mark."

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Yes, this is what really blows my mind. Microsoft has spent 10+ years shipping desktop software on tablets. Everyone seems to think that Surface and Windows 8 is the new beginning, where Microsoft realizes that it has to change something for software to work nicely with touch-based interfaces.

Except that they still don't get it, or if they get it they are completely unable to deliver. They are marketing the Surface RT and showing that it runs Office - the old-style-1990's-desktop-PC-UI Office. That's not impressive. Nobody wants that.

So the question is: Does Microsoft truly still not get it? Or do they get it, and are choosing not to / unable to deliver the proper experience?

I would argue that plenty of people want a full-featured version of Office on a tablet. Especially one with a useable keyboard.

I completely agree about it being full featured! I think nearly everyone on the planet wants that. There's no reason to remove features based on it being on a tablet, but there's plenty of reason to change the UI to make the buttons easier to touch.

From the video review in The Verge of the Surface RT a little while ago, it looks like Office on the tablet has exactly the same Save dialog, for example, as desktop. How on Earth are you supposed to navigate that with your fingers? Tiny little buttons, changing the folder tree, etc. It looks absolutely miserable.

It might have been cool 4 years ago.

But these days, those tin dialogs and buttons are a joke. Heck, I've been bitching about non-resizable dialogs in Office for years.

They actually switched the Office interface into a 'touch friendly' mode that spaces out the buttons quite a bit more to avoid missed touches. Speaking as a Surface user, this works but is definitely missing some elegance.

They should focus on getting OneNote and Outlook working with Metro, and get them running on the Surface and Samsung Note style phablets.

Both have killer Use Cases whilst mobile; you can be productive with both tools with a touch interface and without a keyboard.

I'm surprised that they've not noticed that.

Onenote already runs on metro and is kind of nice, actually.

OneNote actually has a touch centric app in the Windows store @ http://apps.microsoft.com/webpdp/en-us/app/onenote/f022389f-...

MS actually has OneNote in the iOS App store as well, though it's surely severely gimped: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-onenote/id41039524...

To be fair any code base with the age and size of Office is a massive thing to manage. Completely rethinking the UI is hard enough, but then implementing it? It would be miraculous if they managed that the first time out of the gate.

> It is very interesting that Sinofsky was unable to get Office "Metroified"

It's quite amazing because office seems to be the only reason the desktop mode exists in RT. So it means that it was apparently easier to port all of the Windows desktop to ARM so as to run Office (subobtimally) in desktop mode than it was to put a touch-based UI on Office. It's hard to think this was an optimal choice of direction, they must have been forced to do this as a least worst option ... the only way to ship office in time. But what does that say about Office? How bad must the internal code be, or the team managing it, or the process they have, if re-skinning it is more effort than porting all of the Windows desktop?

My thoughts exactly (but expressed much more eloquently!).

"Least worst option" sums it up.

Porting all of the Windows desktop is essentially negative effort, in that the new parts of the shell are (intentionally) so technically intertwined with the pre-existing parts that it's easier to just port everything than try to separate them.

Sinofsky doesn't run Office anymore. His charge was to deliver Windows.

The basic problem is that both Windows and .NET are platforms, .NET has been the developer-face of Microsoft. When Windows projected its API to C++, Javascript and .NET, developers naturally feel wronged. However, making DevDiv look good has not been Steve's task (or that's what Steve believed so). Steve's job is to deliver a platform with the broadest reach.

I don't see "Metroification" as an easy thing. Probably you need to leave features to adapt to a more restricted UI.

In some way it was an impossible task.

Balmer never believed in simplified apps from the beginning.

Metro feels like compromise to keep people tied to the desktop.

A Metro-fied Office would have been very nice. It might have even "made" the product as a tablet with a new kind of UI.

Another thing I find difficult to understand is why not have a Metro-fied implementation of C#'s (and other MSIL languages') base classes. Then you would have something like Android's architecture independence and a considerable based of apps.

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