Here Comes the Next Microsoft Office
winsupersite.com
winsupersite.com
Sometimes I think that Microsoft themselves want Visio to die off. They don't give it to students (so they can learn it) and even a lot of business licences don't come with it.
I understand they want to hold something back so they can sell their super enterprise style licences, but Visio is such a versatile tool which has a wide variety of applications far outside of big businesses (e.g. room arranging, garden layouts, college classes, etc).
Worse still each year that Microsoft hold Visio back the web-based alternatives get better and better. Eventually Microsoft will just be forced to discontinue it and nobody will even notice, because almost nobody knows what Visio is or does right now.
I would happily trade Access or OneNote for Visio. Why not let me do a "pick your own licence" deal? I can pick four or five products I want (e.g. Word, Excel, Outlook, Visio, and OneNote).
Why? Because you have to pay more for Visio and to be honest Visio is horrible.
I use dia over Visio - it's a much stronger product.
Most people who have used Office:Mac will attest that it has a better interface than the original. Hopefully this cross-platform release won't be a setback.
I've never met anyone who didn't think that Office:Mac is terrible compared to Windows Office.
Excel for mac is also extremely slow and laggy.
I wonder whether this will be a source of confusion among consumers. The way I understood it, Office 2013 is the desktop version, and Office 365 is the cloud-based subscription version. But I see both marketed under the Office 2013 moniker. Between this and the Windows 8 / Windows RT, their product names are overlapping, giving these launches a muddled message.
Basically, they're trying to brand Office 365 as the subscription, with Office as the software suite, which can be part of the subscription.
Of course, the box art from October still has the year: http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/1_office2013.png
But I think that the subscription-based model will mean that there won't be a version you receive. You just always get the newest one, whatever it may be.
For personal user, Office brand is still desktop app.
For corporate/small-biz, Office brand is Office 365 + Office 201x (desktop version).
There reason for this is because for personal user, they don't bother with Office 365 and for corporate/small-biz, they usually take their time to read the offerings (to get better values of it) or purchase them via partner-services who in turn will explain the whole MS licensing stuffs.
1) Keep Office Windows (and Mac) only as some sort of "competitive advantage"
2) Expand Office to iOS and Android, too, which will have billions of users in the future, more than the Windows ecosystem itself
3) Keep prices as high as ever
4) Dramatically lower prices by an order of magnitude to make sense for the mobile ecosystems, and be more competitive with free or sub $10 Office Suites, that while may not have all the Office features, it will have a lot for many people. If they didn't think that was true, they would've never made the Office 365 web app.
So the problem for Microsoft is that whichever way they go, they will get less revenue from Office in the future, whether that's because more people will prefer cheaper alternatives like Google Docs or even their own Office 365, or because they have to dramatically lower the price for the "native" versions on iOS and Android, or because most people on these platforms, won't care as much about Microsoft's Office, because there are good enough (or free/much cheaper) alternatives.
I think in the end they will get less revenue because of a combination of both not being as relevant on competing platforms, and having to compete on a much cheaper price level.
Can you explain how you arrived there? If office is made available on other platforms it will raise the revenue not lower it.
Currently (well, before the portables took over) everybody has a Windows machine, and buys Ofice for it. Once people change to non-Windows machines, they don't get more numerous, thus, if MS drops the price to stay competitive, revenue will go down.
Yes, they do, they also get richer. But changes in population and economy aren't quick enough to compensate for an order of magnitude drop in price. At least not at the short term.
Could someone elaborate what the sort of work it would take for MS support Linux? I'm really excited that there is going to be web version because I'm sick of LibreOffice.
For example, Mint Linux, RedHat, Ubuntu, etc? Valve has only decided to release Steam on Ubuntu and support that.
I'm not sure what do you mean by fragmentation exactly - sure all distributions look a bit different and have some specific approach to packages/configuration, but apart from that it's all almost exactly the same. If something works under ubuntu, there's no good reason it wouldn't work under other distributions.
While I respect the work put in, OpenOffice/LibreOffice are just unusable. I've tried since 2007 but I've had to use Google Docs and Spreadsheets instead.
I would pay a lot of money for a Linux Excel.
This used to be something I would be critical of the Thunderbird e-mail client for too, but that has come along massively in the last couple of years (so much so that I use that instead of Outlook, the quick filters are masterful). Ditto with GIMP (the Photoshop replacement), it has come forward leaps and bounds.
There is nothing technically wrong with LibreOffice. I just wish it could match Office 1995 in terms of its interface.
I have also posted an apk here (http://db.tt/UkFlvNAm) which has been tested on recent tablets (Galaxy Tab 2).
I have run Abiword on this in an ARM chroot, though on much slower hardware (a T-Mobile G2).
What Excel functionality do you need?
Except Linux, which is quite a major platform it seems.
I suppose they could be talking about lack of apps, like OneNote and Visio?
if an lotus 1-2-3 superuser for some reason really couldn't change his spots after 30 years, excel 2010 still keeps / as a menu shortcut for those folks, even though lotus shortcuts no longer work.